(Credits: Far Out / Linda Ronstadt)
Fri 13 February 2026 20:00, UK
In the age of the singer-songwriter, Linda Ronstadt was an interpreter more than anything.
She liked the idea of working on some of the greatest songs that she could get her hands on, but it was all about doing justice to whatever JD Souther or Randy Newman put in front of her instead of trying her hand at making her own musical masterpiece. She may have had the golden touch once she had a song she could embody, but there were also plenty of other tunes that she knew should have been tossed before she even touched them.
Granted, Ronstadt would also be the first one to say that everything she released before the 1980s shouldn’t really count. She was discovering her voice in real time whenever she started working on her classics, and while it did make for an interesting evolution throughout her career, it’s not like she was necessarily proud of everything she worked up with The Stone Poneys or when she decided to make new wave songs in the late 1970s.
But it’s not like she didn’t have the right people behind her, either. Having Eagles singing in the background of her first major songs wasn’t going to hurt anybody, and even when she started working on some of her classics like Heart Like A Wheel, Peter Asher was always her co-captain in the studio. He knew her voice better than anyone, but even Ronstadt herself felt that not all of her songs needed to be potboilers by any stretch.
In fact, she seems to have more affection for when she brought her voice down a notch. Her stint on Broadway gave her a much better perspective on where her voice was, and when it came time to work with people like Nelson Riddle, a lot of her records felt a lot closer to Rosemary Clooney than anything remotely rock and roll. Then again, that was only a good thing in her mind.
As far as she could tell, rock and roll was never her forte, even during her prime. Some of her best records have a lot of punch to them, and she wouldn’t have been able to get onstage with Neil Young without knowing a thing or two about the genre, but when it came to tunes like ‘You’re No Good’, Ronstadt felt that she should have never even bothered trying to get those tracks off the ground.
She wasn’t cut out for that kind of music, and even if she delivers one of the best performances of her career, she was still mortified when she heard it played back, saying, “That was an afterthought. I still had a club act and you always want to start with something uptempo when you go on stage and something up-tempo when you come off stage. Then, in between, I would do ballads. I’m basically a ballad singer. It’s a good song. But not good for my voice. Like I said, I like ballads, something with a big melodic reach.”
At the same time, Ronstadt may have been a bit more influential than she realised once the song started gaining traction. For one little “mistake” in the studio, hearing Van Halen’s brilliant cover of it is still one of the finest covers that they ever did throughout their career. And it’s not exactly an accident that Stevie Nicks would appear a few years later with as much gusto as Ronstadt had on this song when she started belting out ‘Rhiannon’.
So even if Ronstadt does wince a little bit when listening back to the tune, it’s not like it’s a stain on her career by any stretch. Maybe she shouldn’t have been the right person to sing it, but even after years of easy listening songs in her catalogue, there’s a reason why any country bar in the US comes alive the minute that any singer throws this song on to tell off their significant other.
