The one singer Linda Ronstadt called “difficult” to work with: “Weren’t matched”
In a world that is known to be full of divas in the music industry, Linda Ronstadt seemed to be up for anything whenever she started singing.
There was nothing holding her back from making the best pop songs that she could, and while she eventually started to move outside of the country rock realm, she always had a home singing songs by everyone from Randy Newman to JD Souther. But even if she had a lot of songwriter friends willing to bend over backwards for her, she knew that not everyone was able to gel perfectly with her whenever they began working together.
The music industry might be the home of some of the greatest musicians in the world, but sometimes it all comes down to chemistry in any band. No one would have thought that Ronstadt would have been able to click as well with the Eagles when she first met them, but the chances of her hitting it off with someone like Elvis Costello were practically non-existent when he started to get a bit jaded over her performing his tunes.
But that didn’t mean that Ronstadt was going to back down from a challenge. She knew that she was out of her depth working with people like Nelson Riddle back in the day, but she was willing to put in the work every single time she walked into the studio to get the results that she wanted out of her own voice. And it’s not like the results didn’t show when she turned towards easy listening later in life.
No one would have guessed that she would have been able to pull off records like What’s New, but after spending years trying out new things, Ronstadt wanted to spend time making more simple records like she used to. The country scene had never forgotten her, and when she worked with Emmylou Harris, she seemed completely at home to sing any kind of song that she wanted.
So when you have both of those singers in one band, why not throw Dolly Parton into the mix? Parton is still one of the most wholesome characters in country music, and her inclusion in the Trio sounded like a slam dunk on paper. And while they did make some great music together, Ronstadt didn’t shy away from the fact that it was a lot of hard work trying to get the final takes singing next to Parton.
The country legend had a very specific way of singing, and that didn’t always click with what Ronstadt wanted to hear out of her own voice, saying, “You know [me and Emmylou’s] sensibilities are very matched, and that makes it easy for us to record together. With Dolly, it was more difficult because our sensibilities weren’t matched, but we all had great admiration for each other’s talent, and our voices were great together.”
If you listen to them out of context, though, you’d swear that Ronstadt and Parton had been singing together all their lives. Parton did eventually lend a hand to Ronstadt’s albums back in the 1970s, but the idea of them trading lines together was the match made in heaven that any country fan would have fallen in love with. And they couldn’t have picked a better time to jump on the bandwagon, either.
This was the age of supergroups like the Traveling Wilburys, and since the 1990s would usher in a golden age for country music, Trio was the album that was warming everyone up for something amazing back in 1987. The giants like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain hadn’t come out of the woodwork, but this was the kind of thing that millions of country fans could take pride in.
