The one band Linda Ronstadt said was much better than her: “I’m not comparing myself”
There was never any sense in competing with a singer like Linda Ronstadt in Los Angeles.
She was one of the finest vocalists that the Sunset Strip had ever seen when she first landed in the Sunshine State, and even when she was working with the future members of the Eagles, there was no reason to think that Don Henley was ever going to show her up from behind the drum kit when he played. Her voice was one-of-a-kind in many respects, but she was the first to say that she was much more comfortable with the musical voices that were surrounding her on half of her albums.
Because as much as Ronstadt could sing anything well, she needed to have the right song in front of her to get everything right. She never wanted to be singing karaoke every time she sang, and even if she wasn’t living the life that she had heard about in one of her songs, she was approaching her songs the same way an actor would. Her questions normally revolved around playing a character in a song, and if she couldn’t do that, it was best left off her albums.
But even if she whipped her voice into shape when making some of her masterpieces, like Heart Like A Wheel, there were always limits on where she could go. She loved the idea of harmonising with someone like Emmylou Harris for the rest of her life, but beyond being a great singer in her own right, she felt that her brain couldn’t really process the kind of talent that Steely Dan were working with whenever they made one of their albums.
Then again, not many people in the music industry can claim to fully understand Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. There’s a certain magic that happened whenever they walked into the studio, and even if they had some of the top session players working with them every time they performed, it didn’t matter if they didn’t have the mojo for a particular song. They needed every track to be perfect, and Ronstadt could only hope to catch a brief whiff of what they could do on record.
‘Easy For You To Say’ was the first time that she tried to match what ‘The Dan’ were doing on record, but she was also the first person to say that she was nowhere close to their level of finesse, saying, “I was thinking about the sound Steely Dan got on their records – I’m not comparing myself to Steely Dan, they’re much better than me – but I was going for that smooth, uptown sound. By getting to sing it more than once and experimenting with it, I found different textures that I wouldn’t have found just by standing in front of the mic and opening up.”
But even if you look at the high pedigree of musicians that Ronstadt was working with, it was no context. Steely Dan and Gary Katz had created records that sounded like they had been mastered by rock and roll angels, and no matter how much help she got from everyone from Jim Horn to Lindsey Buckingham to Dolly Parton, there was no way that she was going to reach that level of musicianship.
And that also applies to the lead vocals as well. No one’s going to argue that Ronstadt wasn’t one of the finest vocalists of her generation, but even when you look at the kind of backing vocals that Michael McDonald was layering in the background of a song like ‘Peg’, no one else could have imagined making vocal phrases that were that thorough.
Granted, it’s not like ‘The Dan’ ever apologised for wanting to get the best out of everything they made. They wanted the chance to stretch the boundaries of what modern pop music could sound like, and even if they spent their entire budget on making their music sound perfect, it was a small price for them to pay to have some of the best-produced albums the world had ever heard.
