“It’s powerful, almost godlike”: The song Linda Ronstadt said would make its writer sick
Linda Ronstadt never claimed to be the greatest songwriter that the world had ever seen by any means.
Her role was as a singer before anything else, and even if it took her a while to get the right tune out of one of her friends, she was going to move the Earth if she could manage to get the right vocal that she needed to deliver one of her songs correctly. Every one of her tunes needed to have some sort of personal connection when she sang, but there were more than a few times when she felt that she butchered a classic compared to what she was capable of in her prime.
But when looking at Ronstadt’s career, it’s important to look at the distinction between the songs that she wanted to make in her later career and what she did when she was one of the queens of country rock. She had come a long way by the time she started working on What’s New, and she wasn’t about to start making the most simplistic rock and roll music ever made once she had spent so much time working with people like Nelson Riddle. She had a lot more to offer, and she didn’t feel like taking a step backwards by any means.
Based on her track record, though, she wasn’t exactly working at a disadvantage when singing her classic songs. She might not have a very high opinion about a song like ‘You’re Never Good’, but the whole reason why the song works is that you can hear her pushing herself to be the best version of herself that she can. It does have a few imperfections, but that’s what makes the song human.
And even if Ronstadt’s tunes didn’t have the best vocal performance in her eyes, her heroes weren’t always about making the most pristine vocals of all time. Jackson Browne was simply singing the best songs that he could and leaving everyone spellbound by the time he was finished, and when you look through every single Randy Newman record, he even talked about how much worse his voice was compared to all of the background singers he had on some of his classics.
When Ronstadt first began working with Warren Zevon, though, she admitted to being a little in over her head a few times. Zevon wasn’t known to be the most cerebral artist in the world by any stretch, but when you look at the way that he uses metaphors, Ronstadt felt that she might not have been the best person for the job when she started singing a tune like ‘Mohammed’s Radio’. She was a fantastic singer, no doubt, but she felt that someone else needed to be singing the song to do it justice.
And even though Ronstadt went through with it, she admitted that Zevon would have been sick of what she had made, saying, “He uses the metaphor of Mohammed’s radio like … it’s omnipresent and it’s powerful, almost godlike. He uses Mohammed instead of Jesus or Buddha. He just happened to pick Mohammed, I guess. God, Warren probably will be throwing up if he reads this and I’m interpreting his song for him.”
Then again, it’s not like Ronstadt gives a terrible performance or anything. She definitely has the range to pull off a song like this, but since the song demanded another kind of singer, it broke one of her cardinal rules of singing. She wanted to believe in every tune she sang, and she wasn’t going to get anywhere if she couldn’t get the thought of someone else doing a better version out of her head.
But that’s something that every single musician needs to learn sooner or later. As much as you might be looking to make the perfect version of any song, the most that you can hope for is to be yourself whenever you make a record, and it’s not like Ronstadt was ever slacking whenever she stepped up to the microphone.
