I don’t know the acts and I don’t know the music. I don’t listen to mainstream radio anymore. I listen to Mexican radio-the local Banda station out of San Jose. I don’t listen to my own stuff very much.ĭo you ever hear yourself on the radio in unexpected places? Sometimes I don’t remember the words, so I have to look them up. I can hear what I would be doing with it. When you sing in your mind, what do you hear? The Korean band I saw was called SsingSsing. Natalia Lafourcade, who’s a Mexican artist that I love particularly. They get musicians to come in and play live in a really tiny little space behind a desk. I found this Korean band that I thought was sort of interesting on Tiny Desk concerts, the NPR series. I’m an audiophile, but I’ve just gotten used to the convenience of being able to hear twenty-nine different performances of one role. It’s so terrible-I listen to it on YouTube. It’s hard for me to stand around, so if there’s a situation where I’m liable to be caught in a doorway talking to somebody for five minutes, I tend to avoid that. It’s hard for me to sit in a restaurant or sit up in a chair. I have really nice friends they come over and hang out with me. His books are nice and long, so it takes a couple of days to get through them. I read “Buddenbrooks,” and I fell in love with his writing. I’m reading Thomas Mann, “The Magic Mountain.” I somehow got to be this age without having read Thomas Mann, and I’m trying to make up for it. I do a lot of reading, but I’m starting to have trouble with my eyes, so that’s kind of a problem. Well, I lie down a lot, because I’m disabled. What is your day-to-day life like these days? Our conversations have been edited and condensed. She spoke with The New Yorker twice by phone from her home in San Francisco. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, close to the border-a place that has since become a political flashpoint.Ī new documentary, “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice,” directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and opening September 6th, looks back on Ronstadt’s adventurous career. Her grandfather was a Mexican bandleader, and her father had serenaded her mother with Mexican folk songs in a beautiful baritone. The record also returned Ronstadt to her roots. In the eighties, she starred in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance” on Broadway, recorded a standards album with the veteran arranger Nelson Riddle, and released “Canciones de Mi Padre,” a collection of traditional Mexican songs, which became the best-selling non-English-language album in American history.
Along the way, two of her backup musicians left to form the Eagles.īut Ronstadt, now seventy-three, didn’t rest on her greatest hits, experimenting instead with a dizzying range of genres. Ronstadt’s earth-shaking voice and spunky stage presence jolted her to fame in the late sixties, and her renditions of “Different Drum” (with her early group, the Stone Poneys), “You’re No Good” (from her breakthrough album, “Heart Like a Wheel”), “Blue Bayou,” and “Desperado” helped define the California folk-rock sound.
In 2013, the world found out why: Parkinson’s disease had rendered her unable to sing, ending a musical career that had left an indelible mark on the classic-rock era and earned her ten Grammy Awards. It’s been ten years since Linda Ronstadt, once the most highly paid woman in rock and roll, sang her last concert.
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