The producer Linda Ronstadt struggled to work with: “Some of me doesn’t agree”
“I have to be emotionally connected to a song, or I can’t sing it,” Linda Ronstadt once said, and while this thinking led her to miss out on a couple of opportunities here and there, it also meant that she always believed in the projects she worked on.
There have been a few exceptions to the rule, of course. For instance, Ronstadt is well aware of her own changing mindset and how things can adopt new meaning over time, which was the case with her classic ‘Alison’, a song she initially turned down because she felt it belonged to someone else. It wasn’t until she met a girl that she felt she “had a message for”, feeling a pull so strong that it became more about the importance of the track itself and not the need to secure another hit.
As self-assured as she appears sometimes, her self-criticism notwithstanding, she has also had her share of challenging environments, especially when it comes to working with new people in the studio and learning that not everyone operates the same. This transpired with We Ran, released around the same time that Ronstadt’s attitude towards music started to change and evolve, and she became fixated on the idea of wanting “to do the opposite of everything I’ve done”.
On the record, she channelled the hits by some of the biggest names in rock, including Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, and producer Glyn Johns, whom she called in after feeling too sick vocally during the creative process, helped to give it its sharper electric feel, which still felt accessible to anyone going in blind.
Ronstadt, however, needed a minute to get used to the way he worked, but ultimately trusted his approach and allowed him to take the reins. As she explained to The Weekend Australian, “I’d never worked with Glyn before, I’d heard he kind of has a tendency to take over, and I never would have been able to work with someone like him before. I was really surprised at quite how much he did take over, but I decided to let him.”
She went on, noting, “Glyn does things completely the opposite from the way that I do them. I craft things, I sweat over them, I take a long time. He just records them and says, ‘Get on with it’, and some of me doesn’t agree with that. I’m a better singer when I have time with my vocals.”
As with many of Ronstadt’s masterpieces, the criticism of the record focused on just that: her vocals. At the time, she felt that Johns’ cut-and-dry way of working would have hindered her usual output, forcing her to move faster when she was used to letting things simmer for longer. Despite this, however, his approach ultimately benefited the sound, as evidenced when you immediately start listening and hear the soft croonings of a voice very much still in its prime.
In fact, Ronstadt’s softer tone is what brings the entire project together, especially on songs that are more vocally demanding, like ‘Icy Blue Heart’, where she proves she always has power, even when she feels she’s at her worst, which is, incidentally, some of the times when she shines the brightest.
