Credit: Far Out / Linda Ronstadt
Fri 18 September 2026 22:00, UK
Linda Ronstadt didn’t really envision herself as being one of the biggest stars of her time or anything.
All of her songs were done in the service of propping up great songwriters, and even though she had one of the greatest voices of her generation, she didn’t really see the hype in trying to be one of the best recording artists the world has ever seen. She was as analogue as it got, and some of the best performers that she ever saw were the ones that could create magic the moment they stepped out onstage.
That’s not to say that her records were terrible by any means, but Ronstadt could see why some of them didn’t work as well as they should have when she started out. She hadn’t found her voice on that first handful of records, and even though everyone would claim that Heart Like a Wheel is one of her best works, she was a lot more cagey when it comes to her vocal performance on that record.
It wasn’t until the late 1980s and early 1990s that she started to get proper vocal training and actually have a better handle on what she wanted to say, but her sophisticated pop sound wasn’t what people wanted. The music world was more in love with what the starlets of the time, like Madonna, had been doing, and while Ronstadt didn’t consider her much of a singer, she at least knew what she had to offer that wasn’t just your typical rock and roll or pop vocalist of the time.
But right around the turn of the 1990s, the mainstream did start to fall in love with that rootsy form of rock music all over again. Everyone acts like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came along and tore all the artificial sides of rock apart, but there were also many bands in the adult alternative scene that were doing the same thing. And right in between the alt-rock boom and the country revolution of the late 1990s, there stood KD Lang, complete with some of the best vocal chops of her day.
While Ronstadt was more interested in what Sinead O’Connor was doing at the start of the decade, it didn’t take her long to start paying attention to Lang’s approach to music. She had been slogging it out for years before she got a hit, and when listening to a lot of her tunes, Ronstadt couldn’t help but get faint wisps from the days when she first began listening to rock and roll.
Lang was still doing well for herself, but Ronstadt felt that she deserved to be at the top of the charts the same way that her heroes used to be in the late 1950s, saying, “She’s a GREAT singer, another one that just, if she had been born in the ’40s or the ’50s she would have been it, she would have been the top of the heap. She still is in her own way. I’m not saying that she’s not successful and that she’s not recognised, because she is. But I mean, the culture is giving a lot of support to people who are entertainers.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Sure, Lang didn’t have the same kind of charisma that the more glamorous singers had at the time, but it’s not like Ronstadt was the only one taking notice. No one could have claimed to be able to sing with someone like Roy Orbison and hold their own, and yet when listening to Lang’s duet with the softer ‘Man in Black’ on their re-recording of ‘Crying’, you could hear that she had what it took to hang with someone that immense.
She was a singer who was a tad out of time with the rest of the world, but Ronstadt wasn’t interested in going along with trends all the time. Her focus was on real musicians who were making a name for themselves, and there weren’t many singers who were able to put their entire soul into every song that they sang the same way that Lang did whenever she recorded one of her records.
