The singer Linda Ronstadt said was too hard to emulate: “It has so many layers”
There’s hardly anyone who could compete with Linda Ronstadt when she first debuted.
Compared to all the other female singers out at the time, she wasn’t coming from the Grace Slick or Janis Joplin school of singing, nor did she really need half the time she had a microphone in her hand. All she needed to do was find the right songs that fit her voice every single time she played, but there were bound to be a few songwriters who gave her a run for her money whenever she started working on her proper records.
The first thing she needed to do was find the right confidante whenever she was making some of her classics. Peter Asher might not have been the most impressive musician that the world had ever seen, but his partnership with Ronstadt was always about searching for the right song for her to sing. ‘You’re No Good’ and ‘When Will I Be Loved’ were fantastic tunes on their own, but things were bound to go up a notch when she started working on records by Jimmy Webb and JD Souther.
She could have continued down that road for the rest of her life, but every singer is going to want a challenge every now and again. Singing the same song over and over again can get really boring really quickly, and sometimes the best way to mix things up is to take a chance on something that no one thought was going to work.
This probably explains why Ronstadt working on Pirates of Penzance came right out of nowhere. No one was saying that there was good money to be made in the Broadway circuit, but Ronstadt had wanted the chance to grow as a singer for years at that point. She couldn’t stand the sound of her own voice on record, but if she was able to channel her energy into perfecting her vocal tone, there was no limit to where she could go when she began working with the more advanced songs on What’s New.
But she already had some training from the greatest songwriters at the time, whether she knew it or not. There were plenty of artists who were serving up heartbreaking stuff in Los Angeles, but Randy Newman was something a little bit different. He was still a fantastic songwriter, but a lot of the greatest tunes that he ever made wasn’t about trying to make a great sweeping statement. It was all in the delivery, and Ronstadt remembered struggling until she finally got a version of Newman’s tunes that she was happy with.
Newman would have probably told you himself that he had the vocal range of a wounded water buffalo, but Ronstadt felt that his voice was impossible to separate from his songs without putting in the work, saying, “Well you have to mark me down as a drooling slobbering Randy Newman fan. And I don’t think Randy even likes vocal music. You know, I think he just got me because I have a wide enough range to sing his song. His stuff is really hard to sing because it has so many layers, and his writing is doing the commenting.”
A lot of those vocal leaps in his songs might not have been all that pleasant to hear coming out of his mouth, but even when listening to what he did on his Disney soundtracks, that complexity didn’t change. He might have been more comfortable singing a song like ‘You’ve Got a Friend In Me’, but there are still those complex musical phrases that you wouldn’t normally find in a traditional pop song.
Because when you think about it, Newman was about so much more than being a pure pop songwriter. He was a stylist whenever he got behind the piano, and every single one of his songs was always going to be the most perfect blend of harmony that anyone could have thought of.
