The song Linda Ronstadt fell in love with but “didn’t have any business singing”
Linda Ronstadt possesses one of those golden voices that could make even a shopping list sound beautiful. Her voice is so captivating that artists lined up, eager to have her sing their songs and transform them with her stunning folk tones. With so many offers on the table, she never needed to write her own songs—she could simply choose a track that resonated with her and make it uniquely hers. But while singing was her career, there were times when her deep love for music called for a moment of privacy.
It’s a feeling that all music fans know well. Sometimes, a song is so great that you want to shout about it from the rooftops. You want the whole world to hear it and love it too, desperate to do your part in making a certain special track a better-known hit, wondering why on earth the music community has allowed it to be, in your opinion, so underrated.
But then, other times, a song hits a specific part of your soul that instantly feels too precious to share. There are some pieces of art that move us so deeply and feel so in tune with our inner workings and thoughts that the idea of sharing them feels too revealing and vulnerable. Instead, you want to keep it to yourself as a secret to be enjoyed in the privacy of your own world.
Ronstadt had that, too. Even though she built her whole career off covering songs she loved by other artists, every now and then, she loved a track so much that it didn’t feel right to put her voice to it. It felt like the song wasn’t hers to play with, so instead, she wanted to keep it safe and whole and merely enjoy it like any other music fan.
“I did fall in love with some songs I didn’t have any business singing,” she told Alta, “Like ‘Sail Away,’ by Randy Newman”. Picking out Newman’s beloved 1972 track, the song is regularly regarded as one of his best. The track is somehow both starkly yet subtly political as the lyrics deal with the ideals of America versus the realities of the country’s society and dark history. It’s one of Newman’s classic piano ballads, but the lyrics are of epic proportions as a true gold standard of musical storytelling.
That was something that Ronstadt loved but didn’t feel the need to turn her voice to it. Perhaps it was that she comes from a pioneering family with their own complex history and relationship to America, making her own personal relationship to the lyrics feel too complex, especially when it is a song predominantly about the struggles of Black Americans. Or it could be that she simply loved the song and knows that not every track she loves needs to be repurposed for her own career.
However, Ronstadt has sung plenty of songs by Randy Newman. The two musicians are close friends with a clear mutual admiration for one another. She’s covered his tracks ‘Texas Girl at the Funeral of Her Father’, ‘Real Emotional Girl’ and plenty more. She also provided vocals for Faust, Newman’s 1995 album of the musical he wrote. There’s even beautiful footage of the pair dueting on his track, ‘Linda’, combining their voices as they sing, “Linda, Linda, I love you.”
So it’s clear that Ronstadt was more than willing to sing plenty of Newman’s songs and clearly deeply loves a lot of his catalogue. But the choice about which songs she would record and which she would admire in private is a complex thing.
“It could be just a line that expressed something I felt strongly. Or the way the chords were voiced that made me feel a certain way,” she said about what made her want to cover a track, claiming that it all had to come down to her own personal taste. But as a music fan as well as a music maker, she likens loving a song to something bigger and more beautiful than even loving a person as she said, “It lasts a lot longer, and you have a much more honest relationship with it.”
