The 1970s songwriter Linda Ronstadt knew never made a bad song: “At the top of his talent”
The art of making a great song wasn’t lost on Linda Ronstadt whenever she made a new record.
She wasn’t gifted with the same kinds of skills that every other classic artist had when singing her tunes, and a lot of the best moments of her career were when she transformed someone else’s song into something extraordinary whenever she made her own records. But even if every single songwriter has that one moment where they can do no wrong, Ronstadt felt that the best in their field are the ones who keep making one classic track after the next until the end of time.
That said, it’s not like Ronstadt didn’t have a good education of what made a great song when she was growing up in Los Angeles. She was surrounded by some of the greatest songwriters that anyone had ever known, and even if none of them were necessarily big yet, being able to hang out with everyone from Randy Newman to Don Henley to JD Souther behind the scenes could at least give her an idea of the kind of person that she could be if she got her hands on any number of their tunes.
But it was a lot more difficult trying to find songs that fit with her voice. It’s easy to think that most people just need to find the right song that fits someone’s range, but that’s not how it worked for Ronstadt. She wanted to make music that reflected her vocal personality, and if she wasn’t able to sell a song in the right way whenever she sang, she was probably better off shelving it or suggesting that someone else sing the tune.
Not every songwriter was able to understand the kind of music that she wanted to make, but Jackson Browne was one of the few people whom she understood almost instantly. He was barely out of his teens when making some of his greatest tunes, and even if Late for the Sky wasn’t one of the biggest records in the world at the time, anyone growing up in Los Angeles was studying that kind of record to understand how to write songs.
And even years after first listening to some of Browne’s songs, Ronstadt felt that there was no one else that could possibly have the same kind of track record that he did, saying, “We didn’t think, ‘Oh there’s Jackson Browne, he’s a star.’ I thought he wrote really good songs. Better than any person I had ever seen writing in California.”
“‘These Days’ is a beautiful song. Beautiful [and] well-crafted. [He’s a] really fine songwriter who still writes at the top of his talent. He hasn’t had one of those [duds]. He just kept going.”
Linda Ronstadt
Not all of what Browne was doing was all that complicated, but every one of his tunes were usually about getting the right specifics in every song. The role of any songwriter is usually to write the same way a painter paints, and by leaving just the right details out of the picture, Browne almost sounded like he was singing to you through the speakers when he was talking about his different romantic tales.
And it’s not like Ronstadt was alone in thinking that. Even when Bruce Springsteen was coming up, trying to make the best tunes that he could, you can tell that he was trying to see what he could do to level up his game when Browne was performing. He was only in a small club at the time, but he could still hold that audience in a trance whenever he started singing a tune like ‘These Days’.
Because as much as Ronstadt was able to put her own spin on classic songs, Browne is one of the few artists who really doesn’t need that kind of tweaking. All of his tunes are pretty much perfect from back to front, and it’s up to everyone else to try to make their own version of what he had already crafted.
