The one musician Linda Ronstadt said was better than anyone in California: “More evolved”
To Linda Ronstadt, all music meant more than a catchy tune to sing along to.
The purpose of any great singer is to be able to translate a feeling whenever they sing, and you can hear almost every single word that came out of Ronstadt’s mouth when she was making her classic tunes. But even growing up in a scene that seemed to breed classic songwriters, Ronstadt felt that a few shone brighter than the others whenever she found her way down to the Troubadour club.
Then again, Ronstadt was in a unique position compared to everyone else in the scene. She never claimed to be a songwriter on the same level as Bob Dylan, so if she spent her whole life singing, she could judge the song a lot better than any songwriter could. That was the much-needed outside perspective everyone loved, and Ronstadt knew to surround herself with people who excelled in their field.
After all, the Los Angeles rock scene had already given the world Brian Wilson as well as the greatest names in country-rock like Gram Parsons, but Ronstadt knew her own generation had something else to say. Neil Young had been a colleague and showed her the kind of great rustic songs that people could write, like ‘Heart of Gold’, but when she began listening to the stories within the songs, there was no one else in the same ballpark as Jackson Browne when he first started making his tunes.
Despite never reaching the same heights as bands like the Eagles, Browne was looking to hit the listener on a much deeper level whenever he played. Not all of his songs had the biggest hooks of all time or sent audiences into a frenzy or anything, but it was clear that he knew romance that nearly every single artist that came before him, and that was enough to get Ronstadt’s attention when she first heard him.
There had been other great songwriters before, but she knew that Browne was miles above anyone else working at the time, saying, “I met Jackson Browne shortly after arriving in Los Angeles. He was 16 when I met him and had already written ‘These Days’. He was younger than most of us by a couple of years, but he always ran in front of the pack. In the Troubadour community of blistering raw talent, he was a little smarter, a little further evolved in his thinking, a little more evolved in his writing practice.”
The most important word there is practice. According to Glenn Frey, Browne would spend days upon days working on songs like ‘Doctor My Eyes’ until they were as perfect as they could possibly be, and even if the future Eagles leader was only hearing it through the floor of his apartment half the time, that’s what ended up giving him the drive to become one of the best songwriters that the world had ever seen.
It wasn’t even an exclusively California deal, either. Bruce Springsteen had only just been over to the West Coast when Browne was starting to make waves in the underground scene, and he felt that few people held as much power over an audience as Browne did when he was working on practically anything on the album Late for the Sky.
But what Browne did was about something much different from having the right hooks at the right time, either. He was about the craft of songs more often than not, and when he found the best story to tell with his music, it didn’t take him long to translate that to a guitar or a piano when making tunes like Running on Empty.
