The 1984 song Linda Ronstadt wanted to sing forever: “Every chance I get”
Linda Ronstadt was practically born to sing from the minute she sang her first nursery rhyme.
As much as she became one of the icons of country rock, there wasn’t anything off the table when she made her first tunes, whether that was singing along to whatever Spanish songs came over the radio or trying his hand at making the kind of sophisticated tunes that most artists would have been too scared to take on. She was absolutely fearless when working on her tracks, but there were a few songs that she would never get tired of singing for as long as she lived.
Then again, Ronstadt knew that there was a point where she needed to give up the business to a certain degree. She had insanely high standards for what she wanted to be every single time she made a record, and with her struggles with Parkinson’s disease getting worse and worse, she was going to quit while she was ahead rather than have her fans listen to the subpar versions of some of her greatest hits.
But that doesn’t mean that she didn’t leave behind a wealth of great music in her wake. Any one of her songs could have been up there with the greatest vocalists of all time, but part of the reason why she never got boring across her career was how much she was willing to bend the rules for what a pop star could be. She didn’t need to rely on the same country rock sound all the time, and half of her greatest works were when she was thinking outside the box of what a rock singer was supposed to do.
Everyone would have thought that her singing in a different league would have completely tanked her career, and while those albums didn’t necessarily reach the same pop audience, it’s not like they didn’t still sell. Ronstadt was simply willing to play the game outside of the pop sphere from time to time, and long before people like Lady Gaga had the idea of making old-school pop records, What’s New was the first time that a pop star really kicked down the door for standards all over again.
Most rock stars that would have tried their hand at singing songs like Frank Sinatra would have been laughed out of the room at the dawn of MTV, but what made Ronstadt’s version work is knowing that she needed to get everything done right. Nelson Riddle was willing to push her as hard as he could to get the right vocal performance, and when she earned her stripes as a singer, Ronstadt felt that singing a tune like ‘Lush Life’ was everything she could have asked for.
The song is already one of the finest pop songs ever written, but Ronstadt felt that she would happy if she could sing that song for the rest of her life, saying, “‘Lush Life’ is one of those songs, I sing it every chance I get, and every single time I sing it I think it’s a privilege, and I think okay, I’m going to work on one more little aspect of this to try to develop and improve it. It’s just one of those really profound songs; it’s a whole lifetime of work just to sing that song. And that’s okay with me. I didn’t sing it that well on the record, although the chart was perfection. But I can sing it better now, so that makes me feel good.”
Anyone would have been happy to get a vocal take half as good as the one on the record, but Ronstadt was always looking to get better every chance she could. She woke up every day hoping that she could be a small percentage better than the day before, and you could hear that she had practically done everything that she could by the time that she finally bowed out in the early 2000s.
It’s a shame that she doesn’t have the same ability to sing that she did back in her prime, but those records are more of a document of what she could do than anything else. Going through her albums can be a bit daunting, knowing how many genre switchups she did, but that also means that you never get bored seeing her go from ‘You’re No Good’ all the way to songs like this.
