Credit: Far Out / Linda Ronstadt
Thu 24 September 2026 3:00, UK
Half of what Linda Ronstadt sang was two shoulders above most of the people that she was singing next to.
Rock and roll might not have been the most comfortable place for her to be every single time she sang, but she was more than willing to school her fair share of singers who claimed to be able to perform the most difficult tunes imaginable whenever they duetted with her. She was simply on another plane compared to everyone else, but that also came from her having a lot more to work with than your typical rock and roll songs that were on the radio at the time.
Because as much as Ronstadt liked working on her country albums back in the day, a lot of them didn’t satisfy her in the same way that her favourite music did. The biggest names in her record collection included people like Rosemary Clooney, and even if she could put together a fairly successful tour with people like Neil Young throughout her career, it was only a matter of time before she started working on some tunes that had a bit more depth to them than the typical three-chord blues structure.
And after working in the theatre for some time, she felt that she never wanted to go back to the days of playing cowboy songs. That was only a small part of what she wanted to do, and even though there was a whole slew of musicians who would be able to get the kind of sounds that she wanted, she knew that it all came down to the kind of songwriters behind her tunes rather than anything else.
She was already in luck when she met people like JD Souther when she first moved to LA, but the biggest names for her were people like Cole Porter and George Gershwin whenever she sang. No one captured that kind of vocal range in one song, but in the grand scheme of American songwriters, it’s time that most people put Brian Wilson in that same company as well for his work with The Beach Boys.
Wilson was never trying to put himself on the same level as the legends, but anyone who gets compared to Beethoven isn’t exactly phoning it in. Some of the greatest tunes The Beach Boys ever made had pitch-perfect melodies, and Ronstadt knew that nothing could go wrong whenever she was singing some of her favourite tunes like ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)’.
A lot of what Wilson did was unlike anything rock had ever heard, and Ronstadt felt that put him one notch above every songwriter she came across, saying, “A Brian Wilson song, if you can sing it, you can really sing it. Because it’s written for a singer. So even though they’re kind of quote-unquote hard, if you can do it, they’re easier than singing something that has a two-note range because you can get more out of it.”
Further reading: From The Vault
But the best kinds of singers don’t look at Wilson’s songs as an endurance test or anything. Anyone else would have tried to sprinkle in their trademark magic or these kinds of pop songs, but what makes him so singularly brilliant is that half the emotion that singers put into their performances is already baked into the melodies before anyone even starts singing them.
He was trying to get the most emotion out of everything that he made, and when Ronstadt listened to him, she could feel every piece of his heart whenever those tunes started. It could be heartbreaking, and it could be the sound of euphoria, but whatever Wilson was affected by at the time, it wasn’t that hard for him to take it and turn it into one of the greatest tunes of all time.
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