The one song Linda Ronstadt is proud enough to relisten to: “I never listen to anything that I record”
Linda Ronstadt has always loved to sing, but one of the more unspoken side effects she wasn’t always aware of was the discomfort of listening back to her own stuff.
It’s a fairly common occurrence in artistic fields; many actors hate watching their own work because they can’t stand to watch themselves on screen. And if it’s not imposter syndrome, it’s because there’s something inherently unnatural about observing yourself like that, especially when you’re unable to put yourself wholly into the audience’s shoes.
It’s the same across music. Many musicians struggle with listening to their older stuff, or any of their stuff, which can sometimes cause a literal disconnect between the art and the artist. Most of the time, however, it just means that they’ve moved on in their lives and find it hard to connect with material they put out when they were younger.
Lily Allen is the same – she physically can’t listen to her debut album because, as she put it, it’s like going back and listening to yourself “putting the world to rights” at university. Bob Dylan – one of the literary greats – also has a strange relationship with his own music, preferring to look forward rather than back when it comes to artistic progression.
And that’s discounting the countless artists whose self-hatred ebbs and flows, with some who can listen to some parts of their discography but not others, for reasons that range from the music being created during a significantly tough period in their lives to simply not enjoying how the material sounds. Ronstadt falls into the latter category, especially when it comes to matters of vocal technique.
“I felt like I didn’t really start singing with my natural voice until 1980,” she once said. “And then after that, everything I sang, whether rock’n’roll, Mexican music or country music, I thought was better because I was singing with a natural voice instead of it being something I was trying to cobble together with something I’d heard or was trying to imitate.”
There are a few exceptions to Ronstadt’s rule. For instance, she likes everything she made while collaborating with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, and she also likes the record she made with Ann Savoy, Adieu False Heart. In fact, that last one just goes to show that it’s not always about how she sounds but what she achieved, and, given that she had to sing softly because she was struggling pre-Parkinson’s diagnosis, it’s no surprise that she holds it close to her heart.
Therefore, while Ronstadt’s hatred of her own music might be an obvious factor, there are some parts she does like. And it’s rarely ever about commercial success or charting performance, either – as evidenced by her love for ‘Winter Light’, one of the last songs she was able to sing before her voice grew weaker, and a rarity in that she co-wrote the track even though “being a writer wasn’t what I was”.
“I had all my voice for Winter Light – after that, my voice declined,” Ronstadt recalled to Uncut, concluding, “I love [the title track]. I never listen to anything that I record, but I put that on my baby record [1996’s Dedicated To The One I Love], which I recorded so that I could get my children to go to sleep, and it worked like a charm.”
