(Credits: Far Out / Linda Ronstadt)
Mon 15 September 2025 19:00, UK
For someone who had one of the biggest bands in the world at her disposal, Linda Ronstadt never seemed to resent the Eagles for leaving her.
She had two of the best songwriters in country rock as sidemen for the longest time, but even if Don Henley and Glenn Frey stayed with Ronstadt, there’s a good chance songs like ‘Already Gone’ or ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ would have never suited her voice. But that didn’t mean that Ronstadt couldn’t admire from afar whenever she saw her colleagues becoming legends.
In fact, Ronstadt may be one of the few artists in the world humble enough to support Henley and Frey when they went solo. Any other artist could have easily become protective and told them that their little country-rock project wasn’t going to work, but aside from giving them her blessing, Ronstadt even managed to convince them to draft in Bernie Leadon, already fresh off working with The Flyin’ Burrito Brothers.
While the band’s debut was a smash hit right out of the gate, there are still some birthing pains throughout the record. Henley had only just begun writing on tunes like ‘Witchy Woman’, and the handful of songs that they didn’t write themselves go back to their days performing with Ronstadt, like ‘Nightingale’. Once the record blew up when ‘Take it Easy’ became a hit, though, things started moving really fast.
The band had the kind of fame that most would have killed for at their age, but after making a great debut, Desperado was a different beast. Henley and Frey wanted to go into the realm of conceptual rock, but an album dedicated to outlaws was not going to work for people who only wanted to hear their songs while driving down an open highway. The album sank like a stone, but Ronstadt wasn’t about to let her new favourite band not have a hit, eventually recording her own version of ‘Desperado’.
It was all very friendly between both parties when the band performed as her backing group one more time during a few live performances of the tune, but Ronstadt had a different take on the tune. As much as Henley complemented her for making an incredibly poignant version of the tune, she felt that she didn’t do the song justice in the way that ‘Golden Throat’ did on the original.
Henley already felt embarrassed by the studio version, but Ronstadt felt that her version fell way too short of what the Eagles could do, saying, “Don sang that better than I did. (laughs) My recording of it was awful! Oh my God, the arrangement was horrible. But again, I learned how to sing that better on stage. On stage, I did it with just a piano, and I thought it worked a lot better.” But for a song that’s all about the outlaws that lose their way while travelling the world, hearing Ronstadt perform it is actually a much better approach.
If you think about it, Henley’s version is fantastic, but it’s easy to hear him coming off as a patron sitting at the end of the bar as he talks to this young kid about what happens if he keeps running for too long. That’s all well and good, but when Ronstadt sings, she could either be the mother, the sister, or the wife of this wayward kid, practically begging him to give up his guns and do something with his life.
So while Ronstadt might not have given the best performance for the song, she’s a much better sonic character than Henley. No disrespect meant to the Eagles’ version by any means, but if Henley makes the listener rethink their life choice, Ronstadt is the one who makes people turn their lives around.
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