The only records Linda Ronstadt was proud of making
Not even a singer as great as Linda Ronstadt is safe from the same fate that afflicts all singers when they are starting out.
It’s one thing to think that you have God’s gift to the human voice whenever you open up your mouth, but the minute that you hear that voice playing through a speaker, it’s usually time to do a bit of soul-searching when it doesn’t like the voice in your head. And while Ronstadt does have more than a few times where she has loathed what she heard, that doesn’t mean her career was devoid of highlights by any stretch.
In fact, Ronstadt might be one of the few artists who can justifiably say that she did everything she wanted to do by the time she wrapped up her career. She knew she didn’t want to make anything lesser for her fans as she grew older, but by the time she started working outside of the country-rock sphere, she was already embarking on the greatest left turns that anyone could have imagined.
There weren’t that many female artists willing to take the amount of risks that Ronstadt was back in the day. This was a pre-Madonna world when most people stayed within the confines of their genre, but it wasn’t outside of the norm for Ronstadt to be singing along with Neil Young at a concert and then decide a few years down the line that she was going to put her career on hold to start singing on Broadway.
That’s before even getting to her other musical adventures. Even if there was a fraction of pop artists that transitioned to the stage, Ronstadt choosing to sing songs completely in Spanish was an even greater risk. It was only the next project for her, but you have to remember that this was also a woman that didn’t really like the sound of her voice whenever she sang rock and roll.
She wasn’t cut out for that kind of gig, and whenever she looked back on her early records and even her more celebrated songs, there’s a good chance that she is self-conscious that it’s out in the world. Her performance of ‘You’re No Good’ may have become iconic for a new generation of kids, but she felt that her entire body of work could have been narrowed down to only two albums.
As much as she had respect for everyone who brought her to stardom, Ronstadt only had time for two records in her back catalogue, saying in 1981, “I did some records that I wish would disappear off the face of the Earth. Lots of them. Actually, to tell the truth, I’ve only made two records that I feel great about: Simple Dreams and Heart Like A Wheel. Although if I played them right now, I’d probably hate them too.”
This may have been before she eventually started genre-hopping, but it’s not like her taste is that far off. Heart Like A Wheel is one of her defining records that established her as one of the leading figures of the country-rock movement, and while other records had their own fair share of highlights, how is anyone going to be able to top what she did interpreting tunes like ‘Poor Poor Pitiful Me’ or ‘It’s So Easy’.
Even if records like Silk Purse don’t necessarily deserve to be dragged through the mud in more ways than one, it’s easy to see why Ronstadt would be having a little bit of a problem. She had a chance to become one of the biggest stars in the world thanks to her back catalogue, but since most of us are mere mortals trying desperately to sound anywhere close to her, we should be grateful that we got tracks that she gave her seal of approval to.
