“The most beautiful lyrics I’d ever heard”: the 1976 song that floored Linda Ronstadt
Any song Linda Ronstadt ever sang needed to be about something more than your average rock and roll song.
She wasn’t always in love with the idea of making rock and roll to begin with, so if she was going to sing any song that would end up on one of her records, she would have preferred to have tunes that had a better message than your average partying song. And while many of the greatest songwriters of all time have written tunes for her over the years, there were a handful of artists who went above and beyond whenever she got hold of the lyrics behind her songs.
But it’s not like she won out all the time whenever she made a new record. ‘You’re No Good’ was already one of the few times where she felt that she compromised her sound, and even if she made one of the better renditions of a Rolling Stones song in her version of ‘Tumbling Dice’, she wasn’t exactly weeping the day that she could retire the song from her setlist. Because no matter how well she did justice to that material, it wasn’t what she believed in.
A lot of the best moments of her career were when you could feel her passion echoing through the speakers whenever she sang, which probably explains why she’s had a more diverse history than anyone else. If you look at her genre switches on paper, you would be forgiven for thinking that she was confused about what she wanted to be, but everything from her country rock roots to her stint on Broadway to making records entirely in Spanish was all done by design.
She liked the idea of doing justice to songs that touched her heart, but nothing was ever going to replace the affection she had for a song like ‘Heart Like A Wheel’. Compared to everything else from her country-rock period, this was going to be her calling card, and even if she had bigger hits, nothing seemed to hit her as hard as hearing the song back in the day and realising that she needed to record it.
The original version by the McGarrigle Sisters was already one of their breakout tunes, but Ronstadt needed to look past all of the suits that advised her against putting it out. The whole tune was considered a bit corny by the standards of rock and roll at the time, but for anyone that looked at it like some novel country song at the time, Ronstadt saw a tune that was all about what affairs of the heart were all about.
Sure, it might have been a little bit cringy for anyone that had grown up listening to the heaviest rock and roll tunes of all time, but Ronstadt felt that she was made to sing songs like this, saying, “[They] sang me the first verse — ‘Some say the heart is just like a wheel / When you bend it, you can’t mend it / But my love for you is like a sinking ship / And my heart is on that ship out in mid-ocean’ — and I just thought they were the most beautiful lyrics I’d ever heard.”
And while the rest of the country rock world got to hear her beautiful voice on top of that tune, the fact that this was her signature song was almost a precursor of things to come. Everyone would have wanted her to keep making country music for the rest of her life, but even when she had her odd moment of collaborating with Emmylou Harris, there were a few times when she could make tunes that would have made Rosemary Clooney proud when they came on the radio.
To Ronstadt, making more sophisticated music was never a bad thing, and sometimes the best option for her was to make songs that had a little bit more of a soft heart, like the ones that she talks about in this song. It’s not necessarily cool by any stretch of the imagination, but no one said that the greatest songs of all time needed to have the same swagger to them to touch people’s hearts.
