(Credits: Far Out / Linda Ronstadt)
Sun 2 November 2025 19:00, UK
Any artist like Linda Ronstadt needs to have their guard up a lot of the time whenever they sing.
It’s a good gig when the people are screaming your name and loving every note that you’re singing, but when the new blood starts coming up, it often makes the old dogs look more than a little scared. It’s enough to keep everyone on their toes a lot of the time, but even in her twilight years, Ronstadt usually didn’t need to worry about a thing whenever she went into the studio to sing.
Because, really, Ronstadt had been told far too many times that whatever she was doing wasn’t going to work. The amount of times that she was told she was throwing away her career had become too long to count, and almost every time she managed to prove her higher-ups wrong, whether that was singing on Broadway or releasing an album of American standards right in the middle of the MTV generation.
Even if Ronstadt liked the idea of doing whatever she wanted to, the reason why all of her new projects worked came down to the songs. Anyone could have the right look, management, connections, and even a great stage show, but if there aren’t great songs at the centre of everything, there was no point in them trying to get very far after being a flash in the pan.
And Ronstadt always prided herself on finding the right songs for her voice. She knew that ‘Heart Like A Wheel’ was a tune that she could sing for the rest of her life, but there were also more than a few times where she deliberately stretched her voice as well. All of that was about trying to make the best music that she possibly could, but she wasn’t going to be a match for someone that had grown up with the greatest songwriters of all time.
She already had to worry about the likes of Stevie Nicks competing with her in the 1970s, but when Louise Goffin started making waves, it was bound to be intimidating for any artist. Gerry Goffin and Carole King were already the greatest songwriting team that the US ever spit out, so when their daughter managed to have the singing chops to back her, Ronstadt was hesitant to even show her face for a while.
Despite wanting to see Goffin succeed, Ronstadt knew that she put every other singer in the building to shame when she first heard her, saying, “Louise came out the quintessential Eighties woman. She wore her defenses like enameled veneer. It was beautiful. She understood exactly who she was and how to protect herself. She had done her homework. She knew how to move around. She knew her craft thoroughly. Stevie Nicks leaned over to me and whispered. ‘Gee, do you think we still can get a job singing backup for Joe Cocker?’ We were the graduated class.”
That also might have had to do with the timing of everything as well. Ronstadt had already started to move on to non-pop music at the time, so to see someone crushing it onstage without even needing a Nelson Riddle arrangement behind them would have had even the sharpest musical minds like Joni Mitchell impressed by what she was doing.
Whereas everyone else would have been running scared, though, Ronstadt did at least have the sense to realise her place in the world. She was no longer the same country-rock legend that had made tracks like ‘You’re No Good’, but as long as she saw people like Goffin up there onstage, she knew that the mainstream was in good hands.
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