“My voice declined”: Linda Ronstadt on the last album she could sing properly
The worst critic of any great singer is usually the version of themselves hearing their own music. As much as someone can be proud of getting a song down on paper, going back and listening to old demos or even returning to mainstream albums is enough for someone to wince if they aren’t 100% comfortable with what they laid down on a particular track. Although Linda Ronstadt already had some phenomenal vocal performances under her belt in the 1970s, she said one of her 1990s albums marked the last time she was strong in her vocal performance.
However, part of Ronstadt’s appeal was that she incorporated many different singing styles. Although she could sing the hell out of any country song that came to her doorstep, few female singers could put the same grit in their voices that she could, especially when hitting the final verses of tunes like ‘You’re No Good’.
Also, it’s hard arguing with a singer who went toe-to-toe with two of the greatest vocal ensembles in the world and still held her own to some degree. Regardless of how little acclaim she got compared to the Eagles, she could give Don Henley a run for his money when singing tunes like ‘Desperado’, and the fact that she could even harmonise with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton on their album Trio should canonise her as a country-rock saint.
Even though she has effectively retired from music due to her struggles with Parkinson’s disease, that doesn’t mean that her vocal chops ever truly went away. Listening back to the final records that she did in the 2000s, her experiments with jazz singing have given her a far more vast repertoire than anyone else in her field, almost like she was heading down the same route that Rod Stewart went down by trying to reinvent herself as a standards singer.
Out of all of her post-country-rock albums, though, Winter Light is one of the strangest adventures that she had ever gone down in the studio. Instead of having the traditional pedal steel guitars or even a pop-rock arrangement, this is what happens when Ronstadt listens to easy-listening veterans and tries her hand at that style of singing. And judging by her versions of The Beach Boys’ ‘Don’t Talk Put Your Head On My Shoulder’, she can add yet another genre to the list of styles that she quickly mastered.
While her voice never sounded better, Ronstadt felt that Winter Light marked a major shift in how she sang for the rest of her career, telling Uncut, “I did my best singing on Winter Light. It might not have been what everyone wanted to hear, but technically, I could sing better. And I had all my voice for Winter Light – after that, my voice declined.”
Still, no one would have known she was even having issues on this album. Whether it was going for the laid-back ballad approach or singing her heart out, Ronstadt still had the same strength that she possessed when she was singing ‘Poor Poor Pitiful Me’ back in the day, except this time with a little more depth than ever before.
Although Ronstadt has no real plans to get back to the music world, Winter Light does offer a unique glimpse at what she could have been had her voice not been weakened so much going forward. She was already a country-rock forebearer, but perhaps she could have been one of the queens of easy listening as well.
