The heartbreaking song Linda Ronstadt refused to record: “It made me cry so much”
Every great Linda Ronstadt needed to have some kind of emotion behind it to make everything work.
She was never going to go out onstage and sing anything she wanted, and even when working on some of her more experimental records, you could tell that she was still coming from a genuine place whenever she worked on some of her more sophisticated music. But for all of the songs that put her through her paces, nothing was ever going to replace those songs that could make her weep openly.
Then again, Ronstadt was always one to keep her composure even when working on some of her finest work. She didn’t love the idea that she was working on a track like ‘You’re No Good’, but even if she didn’t think she had the voice to pull off a song like that, you can’t imagine another voice on the song. But if you wanted to hear music that could really do a number on your heart, it all comes from the world of country music.
The genre was the perfect place for lonely hearts ever since the days of George Jones, but the McGarrigle Sisters were the first time that Ronstadt was hearing music that spoke to her directly. She had been interpreting songs by Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon whenever she worked on her greatest records, but she felt that a tune like ‘Talk to Me of Mendocino’ took a lot more out of her whenever she heard it, let alone sang it.
And it’s no big shock why the tune resonated so deeply. Every single travelling musician knows the idea of going from one town to another without really settling down, so Mendocino might as well be that one immaculate place where everything could stop for a second, and Ronstadt could appreciate her surroundings. Everything seemed peaceful in the lyrics, but the melody was enough for Ronstadt to reach for the tissues whenever she heard it.
She was dumbstruck by what she had heard, but she needed to physically work up to the song before she finally had the strength to sing it, saying, “The first time I ever heard the McGarrigle sisters song called ‘Talk To Me of Mendocino’, I was in the car, and she sent that to me on a tape, and I picked it up at my manager’s and I was driving home, and I had to pull over and stop, it made me cry. And I’m not… I don’t cry that easily, music makes me cry, and it made me cry so much that I couldn’t record it for years. I just had to wait until I thought I could walk past it.”
But when she finally had her own rendition of it, she had a lot more experience under her belt than anyone else. She was still making the same kind of country rock everyone knew about, but after years of working with everyone from Eagles to Neil Young, she had enough shows that she had gone through to the point where she had lived the kind of loneliness that the McGarrigle sisters had been talking about all those years ago.
It was the perfect song for that time, but this was a version of Ronstadt we wouldn’t have for that much longer. Everyone else was blindsided when she finally decided to move into the world of easy listening and eventually take a chance on Broadway, and while this flavour of country music was still extremely powerful whenever she sang it, it was a far easier challenge for her to face after she had worked with the heavy hitters of the easy listening world like Nelson Riddle.
Then again, the reason why ‘Talk to Me of Mendocino’ works so well is because it’s a little bit more rough around the edges. Ronstadt didn’t want to let go of the passion that she had in the beginning, and even if her voice was a little bit more refined towards the end of her career, she was more than happy to sing the kind of tunes that helped her fall in love with everything country music had to offer.
