The one singer Linda Ronstadt would never be as good as: “She’s fabulous”
Nothing about Linda Ronstadt said that she had to fit into one musical box every time she made a record.
Her music was tailor-made for the country rock audience when she first began singing, but there was a middle ground where she could work outside of the country realm and maybe find her way towards more sophisticated styles of music. But even if she felt that she didn’t need rock and roll, she understood that there were many singers in the genre that she was never going to be able to catch.
Then again, rock and roll was never the genre that said you needed to have a voice like Whitney Houston. Even in the age before punk got rolling, the greatest musicians in the world didn’t need to have the greatest voices. What mattered was whether or not it was distinctive, which explains why a voice like Bob Dylan’s could get the same kind of respect as what John Lennon and George Harrison were doing at the same time.
But Ronstadt did have a keen ear for what she wanted out of her voice. She could only sing from her experience, and while it would be a few more years into her career before she started singing the kinds of Mexican tunes that she had grown up on, it didn’t hurt for her to exercise that musical muscle by throwing in a few rock and R&B tunes into the mix every now and again on her records.
When she did finally leave rock and roll behind by cutting standards, though, people did understand more of what she was going for. What’s New had nothing to do with rock at all, and where every other musician felt that she was throwing her career away the minute that they heard her sing those classic songs, she knew she wouldn’t be able to go the other direction and suddenly become a blues singer.
It took a lot of chutzpah to be a bluesy vocalist, and while ‘You’re No Good’ was probably the closest that she ever came to making a pure blues affair, there was no way she was holding a candle to someone like Bonnie Raitt. She had studied under some of the best blues musicians of her time, and even when she was singing ballads, it was much easier for Ronstadt to pay her respects rather than try to outshine her.
It was a different approach to vocals altogether to make those tunes, and even when looking at best rock stars of all time, Ronstadt felt she needed to leave that side of music to the true legends, saying, “I wasn’t the world’s greatest phraser. I still wasn’t as good as Bonnie Raitt. I love Bonnie – she’s fabulous. I’m going to take her to lunch next week. I’m delighted that she can phrase better than I can. There are these people that make you go, ‘I’m never gonna be that good.’ But so what? You just do the best you can.”
And that’s exactly what she did for the rest of her career. The whole point behind all of Ronstadt’s music was to find the right kind of songs that she felt comfortable singing, and even though most people loved the idea of making the best kind of rock and roll tune, why would she bother wasting her energy when she had the opportunity to embrace her inner Frank Sinatra behind the scenes?
She was clearly much more comfortable with that style of performing for a while, and while ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ is still an absolute wrecking ball of a tune, Ronstadt didn’t ever want to be put into any competition with Raitt. Not because she knew she would lose, but because she felt that she belonged in a completely different category than the rest of her contemporaries.
