“Sophisticated sentiment”: The songwriter Linda Ronstadt called the best for singers
There was always a higher standard that Linda Ronstadt was working with whenever she sang her classics.
Most people would have been happy to have a song that was anywhere near the passion that ‘You’re No Good’ had, but Ronstadt always felt that there were pieces of her sound that were missing whenever she walked into the studio. It took years before she was finally able to make an album that she was happy with, but that involved going well beyond the confines of rock and roll.
Because when you think about it, Ronstadt was never one to sing rock and roll for the rest of her life. She fit right in when she was singing in the Troubadour, and some of her finest work on background vocals came when she was supporting people like Neil Young, but even if she did a fair job at singing songs like The Rolling Stones’ ‘Tumbling Dice’, there was no point in her trying to match the magic that Mick Jagger was doing every single night with her more tender approach to vocal performance.
So when she had had her fill of country rock, it didn’t take her long to start moving on to bigger and better things. No one would have expected her to make such a drastic turn towards Broadway when she first got out of the pop sphere, but that opened up a much broader door for her. She wanted to sing the same way that some of her idols did from back in the day, and teaming up with Nelson Riddle was the first time that people got to hear the more authentic version of Ronstadt’s voice.
What’s New wasn’t going to light the world on fire in the age of MTV, but it marked a pivot point for Ronstadt. From here on out, she was going to be doing whatever the hell she wanted, and that involved going back to the Great American Songbook rather than worrying about what hip new singer was working at the time. She was still more than willing to work with people like Aaron Neville and sing Jimmy Webb songs, but her heart belonged to songs that came alive onstage.
She had already looked up to people like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole whenever she sang some of her favourite pop tunes, but there was a magic that came with George Gershwin’s music. Not every rockstar was going to have a copy of Porgy and Bess in their record collections by any means, but if you listen to the way those melodies are constructed, there’s hardly a note out of place when you put on ‘Summertime’.
This was what all great pop stars hope to graduate to, and while Ronstadt did have a fair share of songs from rock and roll’s past in her catalogue, there was no way anyone could touch what Gershwin could do, saying, “If someone brought me a new Elvis Costello song and I put it side by side with something by George Gershwin, there’d be no contest. To me, the choice is easy. For a singer who’s arrived at a point where you’d like to have a little more sophisticated sentiment, Gershwin is what comes out of your mouth.”
But the reason why Gershwin’s work resonates with singers so much is because of the amount of the range that it requires to sing them well. There are more than a few songs in his catalogue that have a more extravagant angle to them whenever singers take a stab at them, but they are expertly placed as well. Anyone can see a guitarist shredding for one too many songs and get bored, but Gershwin’s vocal equivalent to that is among the most tasteful vocal arranging anyone has ever done.
It’s not always easy to strike that balance, but when Ronstadt was still singing, there was no one else that came close to her musical intuition whenever she sang one of those tunes. She was more than willing to do everything she could to make a song better, but why would you ever want to mess with perfection when singing Gershwin?
