“I Was A Bit Overwhelmed”: Linda Ronstadt Talks Influences And Retirement

On Randy Newman: “He is still cranking out great songs that make you laugh or cry”

“I still speak to Randy as often as I can,” says Ronstadt. “He is so funny. I’ve worked with him when he cracked the orchestra up so much they can hardly play. He is also an example of someone who is working at the top of his game after so many years in the business. So many musicians have a little peak and that’s it, but Randy is still cranking out great songs that make you laugh or cry.”

Ronstadt always surrounded herself with top-class musicians. On 1975’s Prisoner In Disguise, her second album for Asylum, guitarist David Lindley joined her on three tracks, playing fiddle. “David is a fantastic musician but I also found out later that he’s my cousin,” says Ronstadt with a laugh. “We discovered it after we started talking about our family tree. David and I had the same great-great-grandfather, Henry Dalton, who was a Church Of England man and was from my maternal grandmother’s side.”

On Ry Cooder: “I don’t think that I have ever heard a better guitar player”

The singer also has fulsome praise for guitar maestro Ry Cooder, whom she first encountered in the 60s as a teenager, in the days before she was in her formative band, The Stone Poneys. “Ry Cooder was the first guitar player I heard when I moved to Los Angeles when I was 18,” she recalls. “He was so good. I thought that if they have such good players around California, then I better stay. He was one of the main reasons I moved to the state. I don’t think that I have ever heard a better guitar player. He is also such a funny man. And musically, he is like a shapeshifter.”

Ronstadt talks with fondness about her friends and singing companions Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, and also laments the passing, back in 2003, of songwriting maestro Warren Zevon. Ronstadt recorded Zevon’s song Hasten Down The Wind in 1976, using it as the title track for her Asylum album that year.

On Warren Zevon: “He wrote such beautiful songs. There are some I really wish I had recorded”

The following year, on Simple Dreams, she recorded Zevon’s compositions Carmelita and Poor Poor Pitiful Me, having a huge hit with the latter track, a sardonic masterpiece originally released by Zevon on his self-titled 1976 album. “We were always so connected,” she says of her relationship with the singer-songwriter.

“In LA, I moved into his apartment and took it over. I knew him by reputation, because he was at the Troubadour club a lot. He wrote such beautiful songs. There are some songs of his I really wish I had recorded, especially Accidentally Like A Martyr. I feel like it was a missed opportunity, but I was a bit overwhelmed by doing it at the time.”

On retirement: “I knew it was time to never ever go into a recording studio again”

Though what Ronstadt still refers to as Parkinson’s disease has robbed the world of her gorgeous voice, she still enjoys music and has vivid memories of her final recording session, a poignant 2010 duet with Jimmy Webb, on his composition All I Know. “Jimmy is one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century. I agreed to do it because I felt like he was a brother,” she explains. “It took me all day to put it on tape. I kept having trouble with pitch. We sounded good together but I knew it was time to never ever go into a recording studio again. It was hard. It was something I could do easily when I was healthy.”

It’s wonderful to have Linda Ronstadt back in the limelight, something that will hopefully continue with a planned biopic in the works from James Keach, the man who produced the 2019 documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound Of My Voice.

Linda Ronstadt’s ‘Greatest Hits’ and ‘Greatest Hits Volume Two’ are back on vinyl now.