The one artist Linda Ronstadt said outdid her in every way: “Doing what I was doing better”
It’s best not to compete with someone like Linda Ronstadt at her own game.
Her voice is among the greatest country-rock had to offer, and even if she is retired now, the voice that sang albums like Heart Like A Wheel will never be matched, no matter how many country singers try their hand at ‘When Will I Be Loved’. But Ronstadt understood she was far from the greatest, either.
If she wasn’t among the greatest in her own mind, though, it was certainly a high bar for anyone else to clear. Even though Eagles were part of her backing band, there was always a reason why she was the one at the front singing all the songs, coupled with the fact that she even scored one of Eagles’ greatest hits with her immortal cover of ‘Desperado’. But part of her musical identity would never be satisfied singing country tunes for the rest of her life. She needed to branch out, and that meant embracing every genre she could think of.
Even though it took a lot of bravery on her part to make genre pivots, every one of them passed with flying colours. Sure, the public wasn’t going to be as on board with an album like What’s New in the age of MTV, but anyone even remotely interested in American standards had to admit that Ronstadt had the chops to pull it off. But all roads led back to country music, and that meant joining the supergroup Trio.
Granted, Ronstadt didn’t have to prove anything by this point. Frey had heralded her as the godmother of the genre more than a few times, but Emmylou Harris wasn’t too far behind, either. Dolly Parton was the one who had more of the straight-ahead country appeal, but in Harris, Ronstadt found a partner who understood the lay of the land a lot better in the world of rock and roll.
Both of them had cut their teeth playing old country songs and had even rubbed elbows with the likes of Neil Young, but Ronstadt felt Harris could easily overshadow her, saying, “At that point, we were struggling to get record companies to listen to us sing Hank Williams. I saw Emmy and I died. Here was someone doing what I was doing, only, in my opinion, better. But hearing her finally outweighed the pain of being outdone, and I just thought, Well, here’s the level and I’d better get up there; I’d better fight for it.”
But there was never any sense of competition listening to the Trio records. Ronstadt was willing to her with both of her bandmates half the time, and even if that meant swapping stories about being on the road or taking notes whenever someone else walked in to cut a vocal take, it was much better for her to take it all in than worry about the kind of intricacies going on with her own vocal.
In fact, there’s almost an odd parallel between what Ronstadt was doing and how Tom Petty behaved during the sessions for the Traveling Wilburys. Petty was more than happy to hang out and hear everything his idols had to say, but there were many times when he was paying attention to see how his favourite artists threw a tune together, especially something as perfect as ‘Handle With Care’.
Although Ronstadt was a living legend at the time of making Trio, she understood better than anyone that no one is ever too young to learn something new. It was about constantly trying to give a performance better than the one you did before, and even if it took some hard work, Ronstadt wanted to make sure she was good enough to compete next to Harris one day and hold her own.
