(Credits: Far Out / Linda Ronstadt)
Thu 27 November 2025 21:00, UK
From the first time she started singing, Linda Ronstadt was always a stickler for having the right voice for any song she sang.
While any song could fit well within her range or be raised up a few keys to accommodate her, there was no purpose in singing it if she didn’t feel anything when she hit those notes. She needed that emotional connection whenever she could, and she knew that some of her heroes were the kind of sonic artist who didn’t have an inauthentic bone in their body.
I mean, just look at the people she has had the luxury of singing with over the years. Artists like Rosemary Clooney, Dolly Parton, and Glenn Frey might not be anywhere close to the same kind of company, but when you listen to any of their songs, you have no problem believing that they mean every single word that they say. And given how much Ronstadt changed things up, she wanted to sing what was real to her at any given moment.
Did that mean that everything was greeted with open arms? Hell no. Anyone who had grown up in the country sphere would have been crucified for wanting to make a standards album or work on a record that was entirely in Spanish, but the reason why Ronstadt was able to get away with it was that you could hear her excitement at being able to sing those songs every single time she opened her mouth.
What she did meant making the best of whatever songs were in front of her, but outside of the traditional country songs and the standards of the day, Ronstadt was far more interested in what the biggest names in soul were doing. Because if there was anywhere that understood what the pure sounds of soulful music sounded like, it was Motown.
From day one, everyone from Marvin Gaye to Stevie Wonder were showing countless artists how to make the most emotional music ever created. Not every one of their songs needed to have the most depth out of anything on the charts, but if you believed every word that came out of Gaye’s mouth when he sang tunes like ‘What’s Going On’, it was practically love at first listen for Ronstadt when she heard Smokey Robinson’s voice for the first time.
While Robinson had been known as one of the major power players at Motown for writing the biggest songs of the time, Ronstadt was more interested in his voice when he sang tunes like ‘The Tracks of My Tears’, saying, “I remember hearing ‘Tracks of My Tears’ and falling in love with Smokey Robinson’s amazing vocal. I’m a soprano, and Smokey has a beautiful, soprano-like voice and sings in my keys, so I could easily sing along with him on the radio. This made me to want to record the song.”
And for someone who had spent most of her years belting at the top of her voice, Robinson’s melodies work surprisingly well with Ronstadt’s voice. ‘Tracks of My Tears’ might have been a fantastic vehicle for her to work with, but given the amount of great tunes in The Miracles’ back catalogue, she could have easily made a record covering everything from ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’ to ‘Ooh Baby Baby’ and sounded just as good.
Although time ended up taking Ronstadt in a bit of a different direction, you don’t necessarily need her singing along to Robinson’s voice to tell the influence. It was all about the emotion behind every word that came out of her mouth, and you can feel that heartache in her voice the same way that you could when listening to Robinson back in the day.
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