‘Silk Purse’: The album that Linda Ronstadt absolutely “hated”
It’s fairly unusual to have an artist hate their own work, but Linda Ronstadt being her own worst critic makes sense for more reasons than you think.
Leaving Tucson at 18, Ronstadt simply wanted to be a singer. But even in her limited experience, she already held high standards. An attitude that would define some of her biggest collaborations. “Linda is such a perfectionist,” Dolly Parton once said. “She’s a pain in the ass sometimes because she is such a perfectionist.”
These words usually describe someone who’s hot-headed, someone who’s a bit of a tyrant in the studio and takes control in a way that makes others feel uncomfortable or put out. But this was barely the case with Ronstadt, who knew magic when she saw it and didn’t let it feed her ego. When she took Glenn Frey and Don Henley under her wing, she told them she believed they’d be something one day. But she also knew they needed money to survive, so she offered them time on the road to make ends meet.
This patience and humility also connect to her heritage, too. Growing up “saturated in song,” as Ronstadt put it, she’d constantly be singing with her siblings, be it Mexican songs taught to them by their father or doo-wop. But the fun of youthful serenading turned into a career path when, at 18, she left for LA. Her parents tried to get her to stay, and she’d learn lessons that would later make her reflect on her own child entering the business (“the ride is enough to make you crazy”).
But eventually, time and experience made Ronstadt even more steadfast when it came to what she believed in. She always loved the music she grew up listening to, and always wanted to recreate everything she’d already heard as a child. But even still, when she’d grown somewhat fatigued of her own success, that was all she wanted to do. “I just wasn’t getting songs that were as good as the songs I learned as a child,” she told Vogue.
It’s probably also part of the reason she grew to dislike her second solo album, Silk Purse. Experimenting with country music wasn’t really where she saw herself going, and the nature of the dynamics in the studio made it hard for her to enjoy any of the creative side. She even went so far as to tell Rolling Stone she hated it, saying, “I hate that album. I’m sure Elliot [F Mazer] doesn’t think it’s very good either.”
She went on, “I couldn’t sing then. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was working with Nashville musicians, and I don’t really play country music; I definitely play very California music, and I couldn’t communicate with them.”
Ronstadt has mentioned before that she didn’t believe she could sing until around 1980. Which also means she finds it physically impossible to listen to a lot of her own stuff. And the thing about Silk Purse wasn’t that it was bad, it’s that it just wasn’t very Ronstadt. And people saw it at the time, too.
Even though Ronstadt initially said its unusual feel was endearing because it had a “touching emotional quality”, distance from the project allowed her to grow more comfortable with how she really felt about it, and how she shared the same view as some of its harshest critics.
