Credit: Far Out / Linda Ronstadt
Wed 19 August 2026 22:13, UK
Linda Ronstadt always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with the studio.
There was no way that she was going to go back and listen to any of her vocal performances after the fact, and even though there were moments she was proud of, she felt a lot more comfortable giving her music to the people directly whenever she put on a show. Her career was all about singing to the back of the room during her shows, and that’s a lot more of a challenge when the only artist is a few people behind the glass of a studio wall.
But that’s not to say that Ronstadt wasn’t up for a challenge every now and again. There were plenty of opportunities for her to make a few left turns and shock the people every single time she made a new record, and she found more than a moment where she could shock the people. Because if people knew her as the queen of country rock, no one would have seen tunes like ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You’ coming.
Ronstadt was already in competition with people like Dolly Parton in the country world, but given what she was working on later in her career, it was clear that she was aiming for someone like Rosemary Clooney as her guide. She liked the idea of making music that was a little bit more sophisticated than the average pop song, so when she crossed that threshold, it was always going to be difficult to look back on the days when she didn’t have proper vocal training.
If you look at the timeline of her career after What’s New, there aren’t many tunes that call back to the days when she was playing the Troubadour. There were occasional country projects that she would work on like coming together with Emmylou Harris and Parton on the Trio records, but that was clearly a very special exception when they began working on some of those renditions of country tunes.
Any record like that was going to go smoothly if you had the right songs, but Don’t Cry Now was one of the first times that Ronstadt hit a wall since she blew up. Some of the biggest tunes of her career all came from her finding tunes that fit right in with her style, but aside from the songs not working, Ronstadt felt that her voice was failing her for the first time halfway through the recording sessions.
She was still singing fine based on the takes, but she could tell that something was incredibly off when she heard the playback, saying, “I forgot how to sing in the middle of it somehow. It was like going to the dentist every day, you know? We would find these tones, and they would sort of miraculously slip away. It was like trying to catch on to mercury, you know? I was in a very bad frame of mind during that time. I was very discouraged, and I thought I was a terrible singer, and I was going through that number. My personal life was in shambles at that point. It always is, but especially in shambles then.”
Further reading: From The Vault
But any great singer is able to overcome any kind of setback, and Ronstadt was willing to do anything that she could to get the right sound on record. It may have involved her taking a break and getting in a better headspace for the record, but her rendition of Eagles’ ‘Desperado’ is so good that it could easily replace Don Henley’s original vocal in rock and roll history.
No one really needed to get into that headspace when they made a record, but Ronstadt wasn’t willing to go through the motions every single time she made one of her next albums. She wanted to still maintain the fun of making music, and a lot of her tunes from that day forward were always about seeing the bright side of being in the studio.
