The songwriter so good that it made Linda Ronstadt sick: “It seems perverse”
Most of the records Linda Ronstadt put out always had a bit of an asterisk next to them.
She may have been one of the finest singers that the 1970s had ever seen, but when it came to her own singing voice, she was always a little bit lenient about whether or not any of her vocal runs were any good. She felt like her best work happened on the live stage, but even then, there were more than a few times when some singers made her want to hide under the table when she heard them.
Granted, Ronstadt was often much too hard on herself when it came to her greatest work. Heart Like a Wheel is still one of the finest country rock albums to come out of the 1970s, but even with the rest of the Eagles playing with her, she felt that recording songs like ‘You’re No Good’ was a mistake. She wasn’t that kind of artist, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t take her fair share of chances when she eventually got her foot in the door.
Some of the best moments throughout her career often came from when she was working on a genre well outside of her comfort zone. No one in their right mind would have expected someone like her to eventually find her calling on Broadway or working on albums in Spanish or even leaning towards easy listening music, but every step of the way, she was always adamant about making music on her own terms rather than being trapped in a box.
It may have looked like career suicide more often than not, but the reason why she always made it work is that she had the right songs behind her. She never considered herself one of the greatest songwriters in the world, but as far back as the early 1970s, she made sure to keep her ears open whenever she heard a great song, whether that was Jackson Browne’s latest tale of heartache or Randy Newman crafting some of the best songs of all time with the sharpest wit anyone had ever heard of.
A lot of her favourite songs were a lot more mature than the average odes to sex, drugs and rock and roll, but Jimmy Webb was a much different kind of songwriter. He had a knack for reaching into your heart and pulling out a piece of it that you didn’t even know was in there whenever he performed, and it was enough for Ronstadt to swoon every single time she heard one of his tunes.
There had been plenty of artists who wowed her with their songcraft, but Ronstadt felt that Webb was almost too great for words, saying, “Jimmy Webb’s songs infallibly give me a stomach ache. They upset my stomach. I have to listen to them some more so I can get really sick and throw up because I like them so much. It seems perverse, but it just is. There’s something in the chord, and then there’s something in the words, and I think, ‘I’ve felt like that. That’s exactly the way I felt, but I couldn’t quite say it.’”
Then again, that role is where Ronstadt thrived the most. She was never the person who was able to express her feelings through writing, but whenever she found someone who had the same shape of heart as she did, playing their song was about more than just singing a tune she liked. For her, it was her duty so that she could be able to sleep at night knowing she expressed herself fully.
So while countless artists would have killed to have Ronstadt’s voice on one of their songs, she understood that it was about much more than a catchy tune whenever she picked her tracks. It was about how the song made her feel inside, and when she heard a song that described her life to a tee, there was no stopping her from hunting it down and internalising every single piece of it.
