The best pop singer of all time, according to Linda Ronstadt
There’s nothing that can properly prepare you for listening to Linda Ronstadt for the first time.
Whether you were hearing her harmonising with Eagles back in the day or absolutely destroying some of those early country rock hits, she was the one showing all other rock and rollers that they didn’t have to scream to be heard. Her voice was powerful but without any of the harshness, and all that came from her listening to some of the greatest names in pop music when she started out.
Because when you think about it, Ronstadt never exactly fit in with the other names in rock and roll. She was able to work with rock and roll legends like Mick Jagger, Don Henley, and Neil Young, but when you listen to her music, there’s a certain tone in her voice that goes back much further than the typical rock singers. She wasn’t exactly Janis Joplin, but she didn’t need to when she started spreading out during the late 1970s.
There was no reason for her to spend the rest of her life trying to sing rock and roll ballads, and when she first did Pirates of Penzance, it seemed to make all the sense in the world. From a marketing perspective, it might have been career suicide, but hearing her sing on Broadway was an excuse for her to exercise that muscle. Most people might not have known she had that kind of music in her, but this wasn’t a fun experiment for her. This was a higher calling that she needed to chase after.
After all, some of her favourite musicians weren’t necessarily from the world of rock and roll. She could hold her own standing next to Mick Jagger, but the delicate side of her voice had more in common with someone like Rosemary Clooney, which probably explains why she ended up working on some songs from the Great American Songbook when working on the album What’s New.
Though that album sounds like it was made by someone that didn’t have a single rock and roll bone in their body, it was never designed to be that, either. She had that one phase of her career, and when looking at the golden age of pop, Ronstadt wanted to go down in history with some of her singers. And no matter how many times rock stars loved to work with her, she felt that no one could hold a candle to what Frank Sinatra could do whenever he sang some of his greatest tunes.
Even when rock and roll should have killed out all other easy listening giants, Ronstadt said that Sinatra’s pure swagger could never be extinguished, saying, “I think the fact that rock and roll just drove all that stuff out of the water in such an evil way, and the only person that could survive it was Frank Sinatra cause he simply is the best pop singer we have had in this century and there’s nobody even in his category.” And it’s not hard to see why a lot of his songs hold up over time.
The whole idea of the concept album was coming from records like In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, and when listening to his phrasing, there are even a few rockstars that took a few cues from what he did. Bono had a great respect for the impact that Sinatra had on music, and even for a singer that wasn’t technically great like Jim Morrison, his passion for those crooners could be heard whenever he sang tunes like ‘The Crystal Ship’.
So while people could critique his music for being too retro and not as relevant today, the fact is that Sinatra paved the way for everything that pop stars were going to be, rock and roll or otherwise. The world might need someone like Ronstadt to remind them every now and again, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’s genius whenever he sang tunes like ‘Fly Me to the Moon’. This was the embodiment of cool, and no amount of guitar shredding could take that away from him.
