Linda Ronstadt on the best vocalist of the last 50 years: “Extraordinary singer”
There are no set guidelines for what constitutes being a great singer. Some people get to that point by just having firm control over what they’re singing, and some, like Bob Dylan, get people to relate to them for how much personality they put into their songs, even if they sound like nails on a chalkboard at times. Linda Ronstadt could normally get her point across with pure power, but when asked about her own vocal heroes, she thought that no one had taken the female voice further than what Annie Lennox had been doing.
Looking at both of their upbringings in the music world, though, Ronstadt and Lennox may as well have been on two distinct planets. Ronstadt had begun in the Troubadour playing country-flavoured rock and roll, and while she eventually let the Eagles fly free without her, albums like Heart Like a Wheel were far from the same ballpark as what ‘Sweet Dreams’ sounded like just a few years later.
But quality isn’t dictated by the style of music. If so, disco wouldn’t have been able to have such a career resurrection after rock stomped it out in the late 1970s, and if someone were to take away the synth textures behind Lennox, what she made with Dave Stewart behind her was among the finest pop music of the 1980s.
Because Stewart wasn’t just another run-of-the-mill producer who played the board like a video game. He wanted to create different textures, and given his reputation working with acts like Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks after the fact, it’s not like he didn’t understand the common language of a great tune.
Those kinds of songs only work when there is a great vocalist in front, and Lennox’s voice is still among the finest in electronic music. Alongside her occasional vibrato, Lennox knows that the key to every track is to inhabit the song, and when she sings on tunes like ‘Here Comes the Rain Again’, it’s easy to picture her slowly falling apart at the hands of her other half.
Since Ronstadt’s form of country music was all about heartbreak, she was more than happy to give Lennox her flowers, telling Rolling Stone, “The radio holds no power for me. I rarely listen to things that happened after 1940. Unless it’s an extraordinary singer like Annie Lennox, who I think is the best female pop singer in the last 50 years.”
And it’s not like Lennox couldn’t perform that kind of music, either. Looking through her back catalogue of material, her recent albums like Nostalgia see her inhabit that classic songbook style beautifully, especially when she goes for a song like ‘Strange Fruit’ and actually manages to pull it off.
No music is meant to be about competition, but in terms of keeping one’s voice in check, Ronstadt knew that she was looking at more than just a new-wave icon in Lennox. This was a real vocalist who wasn’t afraid to test the limits of what was acceptable on the charts, and she would spend the rest of her career still pushing herself wherever she wanted.
