The song Linda Ronstadt used to get her children to sleep: “It worked like a charm”
For good reason, Linda Ronstadt is often placed firmly in the country category of any record store, but her powerfully versatile pair of lungs has forged a presence across rock and pop’s myriad mosaic.
While always orbiting country in some fashion across her 40-odd-year career, forming part of the popular Trio supergroup with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton, Rondstadt would lend her lungs to everybody from Neil Young, Phillip Glass, Frank Zappa, and even Carla Bley’s Escalator over the Hill jazz rock opera. As well as excursions into Latin music, Americana standards, and theatre numbers, Ronstadt took a stab at a more new age, contemporary pop sound for 1993’s Whiter Light.
It was a different record that surprised many longtime fans. While creative zigzagging was par for the course, Rondstadt’s stepping up to studio duties alongside George Massenburg marked a significant break from tradition, with Peter Asher having produced her solo records for the previous 20 years. So too was the rare writing credit. While the bulk of the album is typically filled with the songbook of other artists, among renditions of Kate and Anna McGarrigle, The Beach Boys, and Dusty Springfield, there was a composition of her own inspired by a fantasy drama film in development during the Winter Light sessions.
“A friend of mine, Fred Fuchs, who was working on a movie called The Secret Garden, directed by Agnieszka Holland, whom I love, called me up,” Ronstadt recalled to Uncut in 2017. “He said they hadn’t been able to find a title song that everybody liked, and I said, ‘Send me the soundtrack and the movie and let me hear what it sounds like’”.
She added, “I liked the soundtrack, so I got my friend Eric Kaz, and we put two pieces from it together and made a verse and a chorus and a bridge. Then I wrote some lyrics, and Eric wrote some lyrics, and we put it all together. And the composer really liked it, and Agnieszka Holland really liked it”.
Informed by Zbigniew Preisner’s score, ‘Winter Light’ would eventually play out over The Secret Garden’s end credits, but strangely omitted from its official soundtrack release. Seeing release as the closer for 1993’s namesake album, Ronstadt saw further use of the number, resurrecting the cut for placement on 1996’s Dedicated to the One I Love.
“I put that on my baby record so that I could get my children to go to sleep, and it worked like a charm,” she confessed in the same interview.
A record dedicated to lullaby interpretations of old classics, from The Beatles’ obvious Good Night’ to Queen’s tongue-in-cheek ‘We Will Rock You’, Ronstadt’s baby LP was met with some critical bewilderment but was successful enough, sitting comfortably at number 78 of the Billboard album charts and the premier spot of its Top Kid Audio chart, and another umpteenth Grammy for her stocked trophy cabinet.
It was on Dedicated to the One I Love that ‘Winter Light’ found a fitting home, making sense with the record’s pastoral and soothing twilight production, the perfect soundtrack for any mother in need of sending their kids to 40 winks pronto.
