The tragedy of Linda Ronstadt’s final recording: “I didn’t know that’s what I had”
When you’ve had a career as varied and prolific as Linda Ronstadt, the highs are going to be high, but the lows are also very low.
She will have seen stars come and go and experienced many of her most vulnerable moments right under the glare of the spotlight, all of which require a steady hand to navigate. But in Ronstadt’s case, perhaps the most sobering moment of her entire career came when she realised she had to end it.
Having released no less than 29 albums over the course of her tenure, it’s fair to say that the singer had developed a more refined technique for playing the game of the music industry than most. But equally in this respect, it also meant that when it came time to call it a day, it broke Ronstadt more than ever, not because she was somehow no longer loved, but because she physically didn’t have it in her to sing anymore.
Her final album, Adieu False Heart, released in 2006, marked the end of one musical chapter but also the beginning of a potentially trepidatious new beginning, as it was in this moment that Ronstadt realised that her health was starting to fail.
“Adieu False Heart was the last recording I made before I got Parkinson’s,” she told Uncut in 2017. “I was already struggling with it, but I didn’t know that’s what I had”.
“I was having a really hard time singing, and I couldn’t figure out why.”
Linda Ronstadt
Although, in time, Ronstadt would lose her muscle power to sing – and a revision of her diagnosis would later reveal that she didn’t actually have Parkinson’s, but a condition similar to it – it was this same stark truth that she had to face up to. Her musical life was over. In this sense, in order to simply get the album over the line, she had to call in reinforcement in the form of her friend Ann Savoy, who sang alongside Ronstadt’s faltering vocals on many of the tracks, representing a real symbolic moment in passing the baton forward.
Despite the tragic overtures which presented themselves with the album, however, there was reason for Ronstadt to celebrate, “Out of all my work, I do have a real soft spot for this record,” she confessed, revealing something dynamic about her truth as a person – not an artist, not a muse, but her true authentic self.
“I felt like I didn’t really start singing with my natural voice until 1980,” she explained. “And then after that, everything I sang, whether rock’n’roll, Mexican music or country music, I thought was better because I was singing with a natural voice instead of it being something I was trying to cobble together with something I’d heard or was trying to imitate.”
As such, although it was the curtain call on her recording career, Adieu False Heart was also Ronstadt in her most exposed state – and there’s no better legacy than that.
The harsh reality, no matter how much we may not like it, is that Ronstadt is not going to be around forever. Despite what her life and career may lead you to believe, she is a mere mortal like the rest of us, and her sonic legacy will have to come to an end at one point or another. But until then, she’s always going to keep on fighting the good fight, with Adieu False Heart the ultimate testament to her integrity and strength.
