(Credits: Far Out / Linda Ronstadt)
Sat 18 April 2026 3:00, UK
There are countless singers who would have probably killed to have the vocal dexterity that Linda Ronstadt had in her prime.
She wasn’t exactly the best singer in the world by any stretch, but whenever you heard her voice belting out those country rock tunes in the Troubadour, there was no one else who could possibly deliver tracks like ‘You’re No Good’ in the same way she could. But even if she could turn nearly anything to gold if she had the right idea, it only took one song for her to realise that she had to hang things up for good after one too many nights at centre stage.
But it was only a matter of time before Ronstadt started to have a few dips in her vocal register. Every single singer of the past 40 years is going to have more than a few moments where they aren’t singing the way they used to, but when she began working on a record of standards, it felt like she had the power to keep going for as long as she wanted to, as long as she had the right material.
She even managed to sound better on the Trio records than she did on some of her mainline albums, but when singing the Burt Bacharach song ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’, she knew that something was very wrong. She hadn’t been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease yet, but even as far back as the year 2000, she felt that those high notes that came so easily to her back in the day may be gone for good.
Then again, Bacharach’s material is already a bit of a challenge for even the most esteemed vocalists to try. He was a pop wizard every time he wrote one of his ballads, but ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ should have been no problem for Ronstadt. She had done far more difficult songs and could handle them without breaking a sweat, but when she reached the high note of the song, there was no way that she was going back to how she sounded in her prime.
Her pitch was still great, but Ronstadt knew that she was done with trying to stretch her voice any further by this point, saying, “My voice didn’t deteriorate the way old voices do, where you get a yawn vibrato or something. It had been strong, and all of a sudden, I was standing on the stage in Phoenix, singing a real high note in a Burt Bacharach song, ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart.’ And my voice just shredded! Then I started noticing that I could sing the beginning of a note, but it wouldn’t hold.”
At that point, most artists would have tried bowing out gracefully, but Ronstadt wasn’t about to completely shut the door on her career. She devoted her entire life to making the greatest songs that she could, and even if she was a bit rough around the edges this time around, she wanted the chance to make some of the greatest pop songs that she could while she still had time to do so.
But when you listen to some of the final songs that she ever laid down on record, you could see what she was so worried about. Her voice didn’t have nearly the same strength that it used to by the 2000s, and while anyone else would have been glad to push themselves to as long as they could, it’s almost respectable to see Ronstadt know her limitations and quit before she began making music that she wasn’t proud of.
Because, regardless of how many times she loved being onstage, Ronstadt was going to do right by her fans, and that meant giving them the show that they deserved. So while it’s tragic that we will never get another version of ‘Heart Like a Wheel’ or ‘When Will I Be Loved’ ever again, rarely has an artist been able to recognise their deficiencies and bow out with such grace.
ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 