The classic song Linda Ronstadt cringes to: “I don’t sing it well”
No artist can claim to make the ideal song every time they create a record. They may try to say that every album is a bold new chapter for them that no one’s ever heard before, but sometimes there’s a good reason why they haven’t heard that style of song, and it’s no surprise that artists go back to their regularly scheduled music not long afterwards. Linda Ronstadt was never afraid to pull from whatever she could find, and when she hit on ‘Heatwave’, she didn’t feel she was suited for the final track.
Then again, Ronstadt was never intended to be the kind of girl group singer that every other female superstar was doing at the time. She was proud to be able to sing country just as well as anyone else, and while she wasn’t necessarily Dolly Parton by any metric, her work with future Eagles Don Henley and Glenn Frey at least put her on equal footing with the other bands coming out of California.
It’s not like she couldn’t walk the walk every time she played, either. Whether it was yodelling along to Hank Williams’s ‘Lovesick Blues’ or trying her hand at the Everly Brothers on ‘When Will I Be Loved’, it was never out of the question for her to just work on a tune and see what came of it. And when fans heard her voice, she left all of them stunned.
Because, really, all she needed was the power of her voice to do justice to a soulful song. Heart Like a Wheel may be full of acoustic guitar and a lot of typical country-rock tropes, but hearing her put her spin on ‘You’re No Good’ wouldn’t have worked if she didn’t have the same kind of grit in her voice that Tina Turner could do at the best of times.
While Ronstadt would never fill Turner’s shoes, she at least knew what a hit record sounded like when she got ahold of ‘Heatwave’. The version by Martha and the Vandellas had done reasonably well in the 1960s, and considering The Who had taken a swing at it on A Quick One, it’s not like people were unfamiliar with the tune when she first laid down her version.
Hers had to be much different if she wanted it to become a classic, but as soon as she heard the final mix, Ronstadt was far from impressed by what she heard, saying, “I’m still sorry, because I hate to sing it. I don’t think I sing it well. I don’t think the record was good, and I cringe when it comes on the radio. I’m not doing it in the show anymore and people are going to be bitching at me.”
Listening back to it, Ronstadt might be just a little bit too hard on herself. The tune is far from the greatest vocal that she ever laid down, but hearing her sing her heart out is enough to put any other girl group to shame, especially when she starts to play off some of the band halfway through the track.
Even if she thought that she sounded like a dying cat, that wasn’t really Ronstadt’s call to make. Once a song is put out into the world, it’s up to the people to decide, and the fans have been more than happy to keep this tune in regular rotation to this day.
