What is Linda Ronstadt’s best-selling album?
When it comes to questions about the meaning of success, there’s nothing Linda Ronstadt finds more jarring. For some, it means popularity through numerical sales, but for Ronstadt, it’s always been about doing what she loves, no matter where it leads. Perhaps she put it best when she said, “I never wanted to be anything but a singer. I thought that I would be singing at pizza parlours or Holiday Inns. I didn’t have an ambition when I started.”
While Ronstadt achieved success in the same way many of her peers did, the one thing that always felt particularly distinctive about her own path was the way she felt towards her own music. In interviews, it’s clear she never really enjoys visiting her own stuff, probably because of her own critical nature, but also because, for the most part, performing and being in the presence of a project far outweighs the frustration of revisiting something that signals a very specific time and place.
Put it this way: most of us grow up outside of the spotlight, jumping between milestones and jobs without much of a second thought about the details of their importance. They just were. But, when faced with intense documentation and an inability to escape things you did during certain periods of your life, it’s no wonder Ronstadt feels strange about most of her catalogue. You necessarily wouldn’t re-read an old college paper and still relate to your old self, would you?
Perhaps you would, but the point is that listening to her own stuff often feels uncomfortable, which is entirely easy to get behind, especially when looking at our natural ability to criticise anything we do. As Ronstadt once explained to The Guardian: “When I listen to all my old stuff, I tend to be horrified. I feel as if I really started learning how to sing in around 1980. […] I don’t like any of [my albums], but there are moments on some records that I like.”
What is Linda Ronstadt’s best-selling album?
As a result, it feels a little weird to discuss Ronstadt’s success in terms of her sales. At the same time, though, it only adds to the richness of her story to think about all of the reasons why her most popular sale was her 1976 Greatest Hits album, considering how much less of a full, complete body of work such a compilation feels, and how much it likely distracts from the nuances of many of the other records that she actually likes.
That said, there’s something about it that sits right, too. Yes, you’re meant to spend time with Ronstadt, and get under the skin of her material like they’re fully considered stories in themselves (because they are), even the covers, which showed a different side to the songs that only she could do. However, the success of Greatest Hits also became a noteworthy pillar of Ronstadt’s success because it was barely a pillar at all, having been released at the start of her career, before many of her future successes.
Still, while some likely see this as peaking before her time, Greatest Hits only proved Ronstadt’s prominence before she had a “real” breakthrough, made better by the fact that such an achievement was never even anywhere close to what she set out to do. After all, from the beginning, all Ronstadt wanted to do was sing, meaning that early success, however untimely, was less a sign of a passing fad and more a sign of someone with genuine talent and no real plan.
