The classic song Linda Ronstadt initially turned down: “I couldn’t connect”
Linda Ronstadt learned pretty early on that, if her heart weren’t in something, she wouldn’t do it.
To emotionally connect is to understand in a personal way, and Ronstadt, even before she had turned ten, feels that way about music, loving it more than anything. Her heritage played a bit part in shaping her tastes, which saw her exposed to a diverse array of music as a child. Hence, when she ventured out of her native Tucson to join the bustling scenes at The Troubadour, she had more to offer than most.
But somehow her presence wasn’t as explosive as it was predicted, and she found herself relegated to the sidelines, watching as the crowd dispersed into two distinctive groups of the big personalities and the quietly confident ones. By definition, she fell into the latter, but her passion for music and confidence were two completely different things, as can be seen from her past claims and criticisms of the industry as a whole.
She once said she never truly learned to sing until later in her career, and every project before was just her trying to imitate the people and styles she already knew and loved, but, even down this road, Ronstadt’s authenticity and ability to stay true to whatever she felt was right at any given moment never wavered.
There are countless examples of her pushing back and advocating for herself, just as there’s a whole thesis to be written about how she always lets herself get pulled in any sonic and stylistic direction she feels, sometimes to the detriment of her own commercial success, but she didn’t move to California for success on that scale; she just “wanted to be a singer”, no matter what that looked like. She became more privy to why things felt right and why some didn’t, which also meant that, to the utterly excruciating frustration of her team, she often turned down songs she knew would be hits, hellbent on her beliefs.
This was the case with one particular track that she initially turned down, only to reconsider it when she actually felt she understood it on an emotional level. In 1980, Playboy asked the songmaker if there was one cut she never got tired of singing, and she enthusiastically answered ‘Willin’, while also name-dropping another song that she wasn’t sure of at first, saying, “I am completely an emotional singer. I have to be emotionally connected to a song, or I can’t sing it. I was on Saturday Night Live one time and had to sing a song about saccharine…I just couldn’t remember the lyrics. It was the same thing with ‘Alison’. Peter [Asher] heard that song and said, ‘That’s a hit for someone’.”
She went on to note that the “someone” Asher was referring to wouldn’t have been her until she met a girl, “who was just like the girl in the song, and I felt I had this message for her”. That’s what pushed her to record it, evidence that even the large fact of needing a hit couldn’t deter Ronstadt from washing her hands off opportunities if she “couldn’t emotionally connect with the song”.
