The album Linda Ronstadt said opened up a new world for her
It was going to be incredibly easy to typecast Linda Ronstadt from the minute she started singing.
From all of the covers in her catalogue to her proximity to everyone from Eagles to Jackson Browne, Ronstadt seemed to be the godmother of what country rock was supposed to be, which only managed to get bigger once albums like Heart Like A Wheel. There’s no shame in being the founder of a genre, but when you’ve been there for too long, you would have probably wanted to do anything after a while.
And by the start of the 1980s, Ronstadt was already getting tired of her own music. She had been one of the premier voices of the time, but after making rock and roll for the better part of a decade, it was going to be hard for her to suddenly convince everyone that she was a much different type of singer than who they thought she was.
Then again, the idea of changing genres midway through a career is always going to be a gamble. There are countless artists that have managed to stick the landing like Van Halen continuing without David Lee Roth or David Bowie’s thousands of reinventions over the years, but there are also the kind of experimental disasters that end up afflicting even the sharpest musical minds, like when Billy Squier was convinced he was a video starlet.
Ronstadt was certainly ready to throw caution to the wind in that respect, but she knew that there were bound to be people that didn’t see her music in the same way. So when she transitioned to Broadway and started starring in The Pirates of Penzance, it’s not like everyone that bought a copy of ‘You’re No Good’ was eager to see the show. They merely tolerated it as a side project, but when she saw what went into refining her voice, she wasn’t about to let that go.
She had a brief taste of what the sophisticated side of music could be like, and when she began working on her standards album What’s New, there was a 50/50 chance it would either be one of the greatest albums of her career or an absolute disaster. Even though it was far from a commercial record, the fact that it managed to sell meant a lot more than a payday for Ronstadt.
This had been her way of testing the waters, and after spending the entirety of her career uncomfortable with her own voice, this helped open up a new world of possibilities for where she could go, saying, “What has happened is that it could mean that I’ll include both [arranger] Nelson [Riddle] and rock material in my tours; or I could stop performing entirely. To have What’s New turn out the way it has–that’s enough to keep me satisfied for a long time. It feels like the first album I’ve ever made.”
And while Ronstadt thankfully didn’t decide to stop altogether, the record did give her a chance to go through a wilderness period of sorts. The fact that she decided to make an album entirely in Spanish wouldn’t have been possible had this record not broken down the door first, but even if it wasn’t a commercial product, Ronstadt knew that she had the creative golden ticket whenever she went into the studio again.
Because as much as she liked the idea of playing country songs back in the day, there was no point in questioning the direction she was heading in. The labels had told her that releasing an album of standards would have been a disaster, and now that they were proven completely wrong, it was her turn to start calling the shots.
