Glenn Frey on the show that completely changed Linda Ronstadt: “She discovered she had another voice”
It’s impossible for anyone to stay locked into one sound for the rest of their lives. Everyone wants the chance to show off their chops, and that means not having to go to the same kind of chorus hooks that they came in with when they put together their first hits. Although Glenn Frey wouldn’t have been anywhere without Linda Ronstadt before he formed Eagles, he knew that his former frontwoman was pushing the boundaries regarding how people looked at her flavour of country rock.
Then again, Ronstadt should be commended for helping blend twang and grit in her sound half the time. Whereas most women in her field would have gone the route of singing ballads for the rest of their lives, hearing her bring a lot of bombast behind a song like ‘You’re No Good’ can only come from someone who has full control over their voice, which made her sound absolutely gargantuan next to the other singers in her field.
This wasn’t a passing fad for her, either. The entire California music scene was starting to make songs that were a bit more rootsy than before, and although Fleetwood Mac would also manage to score their first hits in the midst of it all, Ronstadt knew that she had more to offer than the stately ballads she came in on. And if her audience were perplexed, that was just too damn bad.
Outside of her rock and roll chops, her work on records like Trio with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton gave us the female answer to Crosby, Stills, and Nash that we never got to hear, but there was much more ground to cover. And while Ronstadt was more than happy to work in different musical fields, she managed to work outside of her comfort zone when she first started making her way to the Broadway stage.
Turning to musical theatre wasn’t totally out of the question, but the minute that she started working on The Pirates of Penzance, she started using her voice in a completely different way. She had already understood the power of making a barn-burning rock and roll tune, but this was the kind of Olympian-style vocals that most artists only dreamed of reaching, and she was more than willing to take it to another place.
“When she went to do Pirates, she discovered she had another voice.”
glenn frey
While Frey would have been more than happy to hear her seeing virtually anything, he noticed that there was a sea change in the way that she approached her music afterwards, saying, “She needed to do something else. And when she went to do Pirates, she discovered she had another voice. And I really believe in her head, a little voice said, ‘You can sing anything’, so she set out to do that. If you’re selling a lot of records, you have a little clout, and Linda took that to places where she really wanted to go.”
And from then on, anyone picking up one of Ronstadt’s albums didn’t know what they would be in for. Her way of inhabiting Spanish songs on Canciones de mi Padre was a look at what she could do outside of her native language, and while she had the nerve to say that she wasn’t good enough to continue in the 2000s, her albums of standards gave fans another look at what she could do.
Then again, isn’t that the point behind any great artist? Anyone in the industry might only be as good as how many records they sold the last time around, but listening back to Ronstadt’s discography, she was never afraid to try something new and make whatever she wanted no matter how many copies it sold.
