Linda Ronstadt is one of the most celebrated singers of her generation, known for bringing other songwriters’ music to life. While the Grammy-winning singer built her career interpreting songs across multiple genres, writing them herself was another story. In fact, Ronstadt once admitted that songwriting wasn’t her “gift.”
In an interview with Music Radar, Ronstadt, now 80, explained why her name is only on a handful of songwriting credits.
“Songwriting wasn’t my gift,” she said in the 2013 interview. “I think you have to cultivate a gift; you have to practice and develop craft around your gift so that you can execute it in more convenient, efficient ways. I just didn’t wake up and say, ‘I’ve got to write a song.’ Jackson Browne wakes up and writes a song down on a napkin – that was his gift. I used to live with J.D. Souther, and I would watch him write. He’d be sitting, he’d say something, and then he’d write it down. That’s craft.”
Ronstadt’s songwriting credits include 1976’s “Lo Siento Mi Vida” (with Kenny Edwards and her father, Gilbert Ronstadt); “Try Me Again” with Andrew Gold; and “Winter Light” (1993) with Zbigniew Preisner and Eric Kaz.
She has covered songs by everyone from the Everly Brothers to the Eagles, always making the songs uniquely her own.
Ronstadt once admitted she didn’t set out to be an “interpreter” of other people’s songs in lieu of being a songwriter.
“I didn’t decide,” she told Best Classic Bands in 2017. “I just wasn’t a person who woke up every morning and wrote a song. Karla Bonoff woke up every morning and spent time writing a song. Some are better than others. Dolly Parton does that; she writes eight million songs a month. Some are good and some are just the songs she wrote that day.”
She added that the few songs she wrote almost came accidentally.
“Sometimes a song would just come out, and there was nothing I could do about it; it just came out of me,” Ronstadt shared. “The only song I ever wrote on purpose was ‘Winter Light,’ with Eric Kaz. We wrote that together.”
Addressing the songs written by others that she chose to record, Ronstadt revealed, “I did a lot of the arranging myself and the musicians contributed a tremendous amount to the arrangements.”
Related: Linda Ronstadt ‘Never Liked’ Her Performance on Breakout 1970 Solo Hit
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