Credit: Far Out / Linda Ronstadt
Sun 10 May 2026 20:15, UK
Linda Ronstadt was the last person on Earth that wanted to listen back to her own singing.
Any singer usually has those few moments where they get uncomfortable revisiting some of their old performances, but if you listened to Ronstadt talk about her own voice, you would have sworn that she never enjoyed the idea of performing in the first place. But even if she had ridiculously high standards for herself, she did have enough respect for her own work to know when someone was screwing it up.
But it’s not like Ronstadt’s work wasn’t flexible in some respects. Some of her best songs were covers in the first place, and it’s not like she owned the copyright of a tune like ‘You’re No Good’ after she performed it. She was willing to give other people a shot whenever they started making their own tunes, but she felt that someone who did a carbon copy of what she had done wasn’t going to get anywhere.
After all, some of the best musicians in rock and roll, in her mind, were the ones who did something new with their work, and when working with Neil Young, Ronstadt saw firsthand what a true artist looked like. Every song was about giving fans something they hadn’t heard before, so when she first met Don Henley, when she saw him play with his baby band Shiloh, she wasn’t particularly impressed when she heard him doing a cover of one of her classic tunes back in her Stone Poneys days.
Then again, Henley already had a lot to learn when he got to California. He was already cutting his teeth in Texas when he managed to catch the eye of Kenny Rogers, but even when he felt that Shiloh still had a shot at the big time, he wasn’t looking to do a disservice to Ronstadt’s work. He knew her tunes like the back of his hand, and if he was going to make a cover of the tune, he wanted to make sure that there wasn’t a single note out of place, be it in his vocal performance or the way that the guitarist performed the solo.
Henley may have wanted it to be the ultimate compliment whenever Ronstadt heard him perform for the first time, but Ronstadt was only confused as to why someone would even try to match what her band did on the song ‘Silver Threads and Golden Needles’, saying, “The guitar player learned the solo note-for-note off the record. I was just walking to the bathroom, you know. You had to go through the club to get to the bathroom from the bar. I just went, ‘What?! That’s that solo.’ I thought, ‘God, what? You know, I was appalled that anyone would actually sit down with one of my records and learn the solo [like] a Led Zeppelin record or something.”
While she wasn’t all that impressed by someone taking her arrangement, it wasn’t like she couldn’t see what everyone else did in Henley. He had a perfect voice whenever he was singing country music, and with someone like Glenn Frey helping to round out her band, she had the perfect configuration for her backing group before the pair eventually split off to form the Eagles later down the line.
Further reading: From The Vault
But if there’s one thing that Ronstadt did during that time, it was teach Henley about making a song his own when he sang someone else’s material. She brought her own perspective when she sang Henley’s ‘Desperado’, and the drummer managed to do the same thing when he and Frey took a stab at Tom Waits’s ‘Ol’ 55’, even if the song itself left Waits incredibly underwhelmed when he heard it.
Ronstadt may have had her reservations when listening to Henley for the first time, but her seeing through all of the rough patches of Shiloh was what separated her from everyone else. The true professional knew great talent when they saw it, and Henley was bound to become a star whether he was singing background for Ronstadt or belting out the songs himself with his bandmates.
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