The singer Linda Ronstadt said nobody should cover: “An absolute genius”
Linda Ronstadt learned a long time ago that singing was about more than hitting every single note right.
Although she could have spent her entire life as a pop singer playing the best songs that she knew how to play, what drove her to reach for different influences was usually her making a way to embody every single note she sang. Whatever she was singing had to mean something, but there was a lot more to the vocal industry than being an interpreter of everybody’s songs.
Then again, Ronstadt made that kind of music work so well whenever she started singing. No one cared that she was singing old Hank Williams songs back in the day, so long as they got to hear her voice, and when she harmonised on those early records with the skeleton of the Eagles behind her, she could have given any other vocalist in Los Angeles a run for their money. But that’s not where she wanted to stay, either.
After all, all good singers have to evolve at some point, and Ronstadt made it a point to try out every single avenue that she wanted. Sometimes that would mean going back to singing standards, other times that would be singing in a totally different language, but even if it may have been a PR nightmare at the time, Ronstadt was only going to sing what she wanted to sing every step of the way.
Which makes a lot of sense considering how her favourite artists worked. She had remained close with various musicians in the LA music scene, but it’s not like Randy Newman and JD Souther were in it for fame and attention. They wanted to take chances on their songs the same way Ronstadt did when she sang them, but even by her standard, there was no sense in trying to compete with anything that Joni Mitchell had done.
Compared to every other songwriter at the time, what Mitchell was doing felt like the most mature music to come out of California. Despite coming down from Canada, the warmth of Mitchell’s recordings and the different chords in her vocabulary made her look like one of the most inventive songwriters of her time, and when she opened her mouth to sing, it was clear that Ronstadt was never going to be able to capture that magic.
A lot of what Mitchell did when she sang is so idiosyncratic that Ronstadt felt that no other artist could possibly touch what she had done, saying, “You only have a handful of people that write songs people can interpret. It’s not like the days of Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart. You have someone like Joni Mitchell, who is an absolute genius. [She’s a] brilliant, brilliant songwriter, but other people can’t sing it very well. It’s all her, and that’s no criticism. It just happens to be the way that it is.”
That hasn’t stopped some people from trying over the years, though. There are always the occasional bands that try to turn one of her songs into a pop masterpiece like Counting Crows’ version of ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, but if anyone was going to interpret one of Mitchell’s songs, it would have to be going in a completely different direction. She has already made the perfect version of any of her tunes, and all that us mere mortals are left to do is put our own stamp on them and hope that it sounds good.
And while Ronstadt has covered songs written by fellow rock legends like Don Henley and Elvis Costello, it’s probably for the best that she left Mitchell’s discography untouched for the most part. Because no matter how hard someone tries to reach her level, they’re always going to be competing for second place.
