“I wanted to sing those songs so bad”: The album Linda Ronstadt would have died to make
Any musician will always want the opportunity to call their own shots. That’s easier said than done in the record industry, because once anyone hits the big time, they start to realise that their music is then owned by a corporate machine that only wants to see them make the same record every time they go into the studio. So when Linda Ronstadt talked about going outside her usual realms of country-rock music, it would never go over well with the bigwigs that wanted the next ‘When Will I Be Loved’.
At the same time, it’s easy to see where those suits were coming from. Aside from being one of the finest singers of her generation, Ronstadt always sounded perfect in the country-rock realm. She would always be reaching for different influences when she got in front of the microphone, but all of the roots she had playing in bars with bands like Eagles and singing songs by Warren Zevon weren’t lost on her.
But that was only one facet of what she wanted to do. Most labels thought they were printing money when she warmed up to working with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris for an album, but the strangest leap was her saying that she wanted to work on the Broadway stage doing works like Pirates of Penzance.
Not every pop singer is equipped to make that kind of jump, but once Ronstadt got the itch for what professionals sing, she wouldn’t go back on autopilot once she reached the solo career again. She had done that part of her career at that point, and since her contemporaries like Eagles had moved on to bigger and better things in their solo careers by the 1980s, she felt the time was right for her to make an album of standards.
Granted, any artist who wanted to dive into the Great American Songbook wasn’t exactly looking to get major airplay on MTV. Every other careerist artist had started making amateur inroads into the world of music videos, so when Ronstadt told her label that she was going to go down the same route as people like Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby, it’s not surprising that most people thought she was crazy.
“The president of my record company came over to my house and said, ‘You’re going to destroy your career.’ I couldn’t even hear him. I wanted to sing those songs so bad, I think I would have died if I didn’t.”
Linda Ronstadt
For Ronstadt, though, this was a matter of keeping her sanity and artistic life, saying, “The president of my record company came over to my house and said, ‘You’re going to destroy your career.’ I couldn’t even hear him. I wanted to sing those songs so bad, I think I would have died if I didn’t. But I didn’t do them all that well. I never sang with an orchestra before. I could have done much better if I’d had it on the road first.”
Honing her craft live may have given her a different outlook on the material, but What’s New is a fine piece of easy listening music from her. No one was expecting her version of a tune like ‘I’ve Got a Crush On You’ to reach the top of the charts or anything, but seeing her take a chance like this wasn’t all that different from what David Bowie was doing when he made wild genre-hops during his 1980s run.
And in many respects, Ronstadt proved to be ahead of the curve when it came to her traditional taste. Most people are a bit wary to tackle something like this on record, but it’s hard to think that Lady Gaga had the same kind of freedom to work on her own traditional records with Tony Bennett had Ronstadt not done it first.
