(Credits: Far Out / Linda Ronstadt)
Thu 29 January 2026 22:15, UK
In an era that was dominated by the greatest songwriters of all time, Linda Ronstadt didn’t enter the music business for a sense of competition.
She simply loved singing any song that came her way, and with a voice of that size singing tunes like ‘You’re No Good’, all she needed was the right songwriters working with her to make her career soar every time she made a new record. But even for all of the fantastic tunes that she got off the ground in her early days, there were always writers who were coming up with the kind of material that she could never have dreamed of writing.
Throughout the 1970s, though, Ronstadt had a front-row seat to watch all of her best musical friends become musical legends. Jackson Browne was slowly turning into one of the finest songwriters that Los Angeles had ever seen, Neil Young was quickly discovering what great Americana music could sound like, and even Ethe agles were making the demos for their future classics in the middle of her house when they first got the ball rolling.
Ronstadt was bound to be the perfect cheerleader for her favourite acts, but the boundaries she broke down for women in rock and roll were beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Janis Joplin and Ann Wilson were showing everyone what female rockers could do back in the day, but Ronstadt’s career decisions were never about strictly rock and roll. She proved that every single rock and roll artist could do anything they wanted, and when she started working outside of her comfort zone, she knew she could succeed on her own terms, no matter what one of the suits had to say.
Because that’s really what rock and roll was all about. Yes, it’s technically a genre of music, but the rock and roll attitude was about not cowering to anyone who tells you to stay in a certain musical lane. Ronstadt was more than happy to go out on Broadway if she wanted to or learn songs in a completely different language, but not even the greatest songwriters of her time could have touched what Joni Mitchell was doing.
She may have grown up in the folk tradition like so many others, but with her background in genres like classical music and jazz, her records were far more advanced than anything was expected. Blue may have been the folk masterpiece, but her later records like Hejira and Mingus were where she felt most comfortable. Her music deserved to be in the same league as people like Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, and that kind of magic wasn’t lost when Ronstadt first laid her ears on those records.
This was the sound of pop growing up a little bit, and even with new female rockers coming to the fold like Stevie Nicks, Ronstadt felt that no one was doing what Mitchell could do, saying, “We were all incredibly different. Stevie Nicks is different from me, or Carly Simon is, Joni Mitchell is different from everybody on the planet. She is in a category of her own.” And when you look at her later work, it’s really hard to deny that fact when she started making records like Both Sides Now at the turn of the century.
Ronstadt was showing everyone that it was okay to make more sophisticated records as far back as the 1980s, but never has a rock singer felt more in control than Mitchell did when she started singing. She had grown into the songs that she wrote back in the day, and when she made new tunes, it was like listening to a folksy version of a symphony every single time they came on.
Mitchell might have fallen into the pop category almost by accident, but she didn’t become a legend of music by accident. It was all about maintaining her momentum and trying her best to outdo what had come before, and while both she and Ronstadt are retired from making music at this point, it’s hard to see any major dents in their discography.
Related Topics