The song Linda Ronstadt always wanted to sing
When Linda Ronstadt was making her first classics, she probably wasn’t thinking about how long she could keep up her hot streak.
Not all pop stars are meant to stay on the charts for long, but even if they weren’t going to be megastars by any stretch, she was going to do anything that she wanted to do. She could sing rock and roll, sing Broadway, or even the Great American Songbook, but no one is there to tell you when your gift is taken away for the final time, either.
But throughout the 1970s, the future looked wide open once Ronstadt started moving away from country-rock. The idea of a pop star making the transition over to easy listening territory may have been a tough sell, but it wasn’t necessarily impossible. Paul McCartney had written those kinds of arrangements before, and when Ronstadt decided to leave the charts for good, it’s like she was about to suffer that much.
If anything, Nelson Riddle actually managed to turn her into a better singer than she was in her prime. This was the same guy responsible for making Frank Sinatra sound so great in his prime, and hearing his arrangements behind Ronstadt’s voice sounds absolutely beautiful on records like What’s New.
But that was only one facet of what Ronstadt loved. Unlike many jazz singers from the time, she knew there was a certain power to playing rock and roll, and even though her friends like Jackson Browne and the Eagles were far from the most aggressive artists in the world, they certainly had some competition with what was coming out of the world of new wave. Glenn Frey may have scoffed at bands like New York Dolls, but no one could argue with Elvis Costello when he had songs that good.
My Aim is True isn’t the most celebrated record in the world or anything, but if anyone wants to get anywhere close to the songwriting gods, take notes from each song here. Half might be indebted to the punk regime, but when Ronstadt heard tunes like ‘Alison’, she heard a certain sense of vulnerability that comes very rarely in rock and roll unless your name is Lennon or McCartney.
And while Costello was far from a fan of her rendition of his ballad, Ronstadt felt that she should have given it one more shot when he began working with Bert Bacharach, saying, “I’m really sad that I never got a chance to record a song that he wrote with Burt Bacharach called ‘I Still Have That Other Girl’ because I lost my voice. I have Parkinson’s disease. [It] took my voice, that’s where it showed up first. I was singing and struggling for years, not knowing I had Parkinson’s disease. At the height of my ability, I think I could have sung ‘I Still Have That Other Girl’ really well.”
If you think about it, chances are that Costello would have been much more forgiving at that juncture of his career. He wasn’t going out of his way to provoke anymore, and now that he was rubbing elbows with some of the greatest songwriters on Earth, what was the harm in letting one of the leading figures in California vocals have a crack at the tune, especially with that much experience under her belt?
While Parkinson’s disease can be a cruel fate for anyone to have to do with, hearing it do away with one of the greatest voices of that generation is the real tragedy. Everyone was going to miss Ronstadt going on tour trying her hand at making a new record, but it’s commendable for her to step back when she felt that she couldn’t do justice to the material that she wanted to perform.
