Tag: the eagles

Squared Roots: Tift Merritt on the Fearlessness of Linda Ronstadt

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In the world of folk-rock, a few artists reap the lion’s share of mentions, with Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Jackson Browne, among them. One of the great voices of the genre, though, is Linda Ronstadt. As a singer and song collector, she is all but unrivaled — a point most of her peers would agree with. Starting in the mid-1960s as a member of the Stone Poneys and, later, as a solo artist, Ronstadt made a name for herself on the marquees of folk clubs and rock arenas, alike, thanks to albums like Hand Sown … Home Grown (which some consider the first alt-country album by a female), Silk Purse, Heart Like a Wheel, and many more. Her artistry recognized no boundaries as she recorded with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra, as part of Trio with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, and in Spanish. In 2011, however, she announced her retirement brought on by a battle with Parkinson’s disease.

“I don’t have any great, huge proclamations to begin with, except that I adore Linda Ronstadt,” singer/songwriter Tift Merritt says with a laugh. And, really, that’s enough. From her debut album, Bramble Rose, to her latest release, Stitch of the World, Merritt has attempted to follow in the footsteps of her musical heroes — women like Harris and Ronstadt — who have blazed a trail of feminine fearlessness. By pretty much all accounts, she has succeeded — a point most of her peers would agree with.

Are you a student of Linda’s work for your own artistry or just a fan for your own enjoyment?

You know, I wanted to talk about Linda because she’s not singing anymore because she has Parkinson’s, so it’s almost more important to talk about her now because of that. I think what we need to talk about with Linda Ronstadt is that, at the height of the singer/songwriter movement, she was the one headlining stadiums with the Eagles and Elton John. I think it’s really important to talk about a woman doing that. She was bringing all these songwriters she knew and loved, and taking their songs and singing them. She was on the cover of Time magazine. She was a girl next door and a member of the band with a very understated sexuality, but she was also an absolute star and a commercial success. I think we tend to think about women with guitars singing earthy rock ‘n’ roll as coffee shop acts or something that’s going to fall apart in your hands. And Linda Ronstadt was kicking everyone’s ass. [Laughs]

[Laughs] What’s interesting is that there’s a quote of hers from 1999, in which she said, “I always mean to be a singer, not a star.” So, even though she achieved that level, like you said, it wasn’t necessarily her goal.

I think that’s why it’s important to talk about, too. Because she is an artist. I think she had a complicated relationship with her success and how she was viewed, sexually, and all of that. But she achieved success through her art. And I know that I first fell in love with Linda Ronstadt records when I was in my early 20s. In fact, when I made Bramble Rose, I wanted to make a record like [Emmylou Harris’s] Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town or I wanted to make a record like Heart Like a Wheel or Silk Purse or one of the early Bonnie Raitt records. Those first records were so raw and heartfelt and just penetrated your bones and brought tears to your eyes.

I remember that was said in the press release for my first record, and one of my first reviews kind of made fun of me for liking Linda Ronstadt. I thought, “Oh my God. This person doesn’t get it.” For me, all of those women, and Linda Ronstadt, especially … this was in the late ’90s or early 2000s. I sort of came of age in the ’90s. Madonna was on MTV in the ’80s. And I needed some female role modes who were more like me, who had something to say, who were not intent on acting outrageously, but really wanted to be storytellers. And who had a lot to say and who were masters of their art. You can tell from Linda Ronstadt’s discography and her work as a writer and a singer, she’s a student of her craft. But she always manages to look so cool in all the pictures of her! And she was in a band, too! You navigate this world of dudes traveling on the road, and she did that with so much grace.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like, in listening to her and reading about her, to me, her fearlessness as a singer …

Uh huh. Absolutely!

… both in song choices and vocal delivery. You can hear so much in her voice.

She’s totally fearless. Maybe that’s the source of her power because she’s so powerful, as well. I’ve sung along with those records … I had a break up and I ended up putting on those records to comfort myself and I was right back there. I’ve been singing along to those records for such a long time, and her voice is an unbelievable instrument. Unbelievable. It’s silken and velvet, and also as powerful as steel. And it’s fierce. The effortlessness with which she can belt at the top of her range, then go low … any melody is so lucky to end up in her hands. [Laughs]

[Laughs] What does it take for a singer to do what she did — both in terms of breaking down as many genre barriers as she did and finding her way into songs she didn’t write, but might as well have? They sounded like they were fully coming from her.

Right. They were realized through her. I don’t know her, personally, at all. But my impression is that it’s a combination of open-heartedness and intelligence and that fearlessness where you are singing with your heart on the line. Period.

Yeah. You find your way in and bring everybody along with you.

Mmm-hmm.

The other thing I feel like … her identification as a singer and, later, a producer … she was no less revered and respected just because she wasn’t a songwriter.

No. I know.

Except for with the guy who reviewed your record. [Laughs] Do you think that’s changed at all? These days, is being a songwriter, too, a huge part of the credibility factor?

I don’t know. I think the world has room for so many different types of careers. I come at this as a writer. But music is such a powerful thing, and to be able to inhabit that … music is a physical and social medium. To be open enough to let that run through you, it’s really an awesome thing.

I took some time off from touring and I missed that. It’s such a joyful letting go, even if it’s a sad song. And I think that’s what you hear when you listen to Linda Ronstadt. So much power coming through these tiny muscles in your neck. They’re so fragile. They’re the size of a dime. There’s an electric current that seems to jump out of her. Like a river of feeling coming out. I think it’s important to talk about, that music is not about a canvas on a wall. It’s not about words on a page. It is a physical, living, breathing type of media. And to be able to do that seamlessly … I love watching and hearing people who have that gift. And it is a gift.

That’s a great ending, right there.

Well, we just have to mention that “Long Long Time” and “Blue Bayou” are two of the greatest performances of great songs. Ever. [Laughs] That is all.

Tift Merritt photo courtesy of the artist. Linda Ronstadt photo courtesy of Carl Lender.

The Essential Dan Fogelberg Playlist

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Contrary to what it sounds like on his records, Dan Fogelberg wasn’t born in Colorado. He was born in Peoria, IL, the son of a classically trained pianist mom and a high school band director dad (the person who inspired Fogelberg’s hit, “Leader of the Band”). As a teenager, Fogelberg played in the requisite Beatles cover bands before trying his hand at the folk music circuit around Chicago during the early '70s. It was there, at the famed Red Herring Café, that REO Speedwagon’s manager and future label exec, Irving Azoff, discovered him and signed him to a record deal.

Transplanted in Nashville, Fogelberg tracked his first record, Home Free, with Norbert Putnam behind the wheel. It pretty well tanked commercially (though has since gone platinum) but it encouraged Epic Records to stick with him and assign him a second session (with the strange bedfellow Joe Walsh as producer). Souvenirs — recorded with a cadre of L.A. session players plus Graham Nash and guys from both America and the Eagles — reached the Top 20, the single “Part of the Plan” made the Top 40, and Fogelberg’s career achieved liftoff.

Starting with Souvenirs, Fogelberg recorded five straight multi-platinum albums, wrapped up the '80s with a pair of platinum records, and became the unofficial voice of the Colorado snows (second only to John Denver). His 1985 album, High Country Snows, is a fine record of songs in the bluegrass tradition and, mixed in with his solo albums, he tracked two sets with jazz flautist Tim Weisberg, the first of which — Twin Sons from Different Mothers — is considered an acoustic classic.

Though some would categorize the late singer as nothing more than an MOR pablum pusher — which was true on a few occasions — Fogelberg was a well-loved performer, a respected songwriter among his peers, and a guy who made a melody sing. Herein, we offer an essential playlist of his best songs, a mix of those pop radio classics and some deep album cuts.

Photo courtesy of DanFogelberg.com

Linda Ronstadt: Hasten Down the Wind

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In Home Free, his 1977 novel of faded denim hippie dreams, Dan Wakefield described his wandering anti-hero Gene Barrett overhearing a song on a nearby record player as he dozes in a hammock in Maine — Linda Ronstadt singing her folkish country ballad “Long Long Time” in the alto that wafted through many a window in those imperfect, exploratory days. “Gene was glad it was Linda Ronstadt, not someone soppy or sickly sweet,” Wakefield wrote. “Strong. Gutsy. Belting it out. Her voice didn’t seem just to come from the house, but out of the earth, over the water into the rickety little town and the scrubland and forest beyond it.”

Beginning in the 1970s, Linda Ronstadt’s singing has had that kind of geological effect throughout popular music: steadying, seemingly able to erase time and trends within one flow of feeling that goes below the surface and the deeper strata of American consciousness. In a time of fading utopian hopes, she emerged as an emissary able to connect old musical ways with the new consciousness of her own maverick generation. “She is offering us something very valuable for the '70s: not a fantasy figure, but a reality figure,” wrote the rock scribe Tom Nolan in 1974. Raised on country and the ranchera music that echoed through her Tuscon, Arizona, neighborhood, Ronstadt sang with a verve and directness that eradicated the pretentiousness that could sometimes afflict the children of the counterculture. Album titles like Hand Sown…Home Grown, Simple Dreams, and Hasten Down the Wind celebrated a naturalness that was complemented by a meticulous attention to musical detail and one of the greatest ears of the rock era.

Those who underestimate Ronstadt as a pretty face and voice who rose to fame on the power of others’ songwriting and production talents — and there have been far too many in that camp — are ignorant. From her teenage days in the folk trio the Stone Poneys, Ronstadt developed a persona that spoke profoundly to women waking up to the way many men had condescended to them throughout the early years of the supposed sexual revolution. She was an everywoman who, instead of building a world through songwriting, did so by taking on others’ words and melodies and reshaping them with intelligence and boundless energy. She grew up in public through her recordings. In 1971, when she was 25, she told a reporter that she didn’t have the voice to do soul music; by 1974, she’d developed her own style of testifying that made her funky reinterpretation of Dee Dee Warwick’s 1963 shouter “You’re No Good” into a number one hit, one she’d follow up by reinvigorating songs by Martha and the Vandellas, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers, among others. At the same time, she continued championing her own peers, who played on her most successful albums. She was that woman who, like so many others, did the real power lifting within a scene dominated by self-styled heroic men.

When the multi-platinum success of her fifth album, Heart Like a Wheel, sent Ronstadt into the arena-rock stratosphere, she became the premium interpreter of an American songbook that she’s continued to redefine throughout her career. It now includes everything from George Gershwin and Cole Porter to early rock 'n' roll, the Nashville sound, Mexican canciones, Laurel Canyon balladry, Cajun two-steps, and the punkish sounds of New Wave. She developed her singular eclecticism, in part, as a way of coping with a music industry that would have kept her in a stadium-sized box — she hated playing those big venues, ripping up her voice in front of anonymous-feeling hordes — and turned to theater music and standards as a way of reclaiming her right to be a subtle interpreter. "Your musical soul is like facets of a jewel, and you stick out one facet at a time," she said in a retrospective interview in 2003.

Even as a teenager, when lesser musical adventurers would fall into a rut, Ronstadt would change course. Setting forth on a solo career after early success with the Stone Poneys trio challenged the boundaries of strummable folk music by foregrounding its connections to country and becoming as much an inventor of country rock as was Gram Parsons or the Eagles, who famously formed as her backing band. After finding a niche as the patron of her L.A. neighbors, from Warren Zevon to Randy Newman and Jackson Browne, she teamed up with producer Peter Asher to hone that rocked-up pop sound that made her a superstar. Throughout her career, she would return to that sound which, in turn, became hugely influential, forming part of the bedrock of many future stars’ styles, from Olivia Newton-John to Sheryl Crow to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Carrie Underwood.

Meanwhile, Ronstadt became a producer herself, an extension, in some ways, of her role as a brilliant collaborator. Her work behind the boards with the soul legend Aaron Neville, for example, complements her many beautiful duets with him. Her deep love of harmony singing, along with her dedication to uplifting the women with whom she feels the deepest musical kinship, led her to form one of the most beloved vocal groups in recent pop memory — Trio, her project with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. “I always mean to be a singer, not a star,” she said when the second Trio album was released in 1999. In fact, Ronstadt’s stardom has been predicated upon her ability to consistently remind listeners that to sing is to cultivate a space where all the trappings of the moment — fashion, fame — fall away, a space of pure joy and sensual release.

Linda Ronstadt can no longer call that space into being in real time, having lost her voice to Parkinson’s disease in 2013. But she remains a bright spirit: the author of a revelatory book, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir, and a role model for a new generation of musical boundary breakers. And through her immortal recordings, her voice still permeates the soil of our consciousness, a clear liquid presence easing our minds and, by example, urging us to continue challenging ourselves. A natural gift beautifully cultivated, Linda Ronstadt’s legacy still challenges us to be more free, even as it hastens down the wind.

Ann Powers is critic and correspondent for NPR Music and the author of several books, including Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music, forthcoming from Dey Street Books in 2017.

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.