Chip Holland 
By 1995, Linda Ronstadt had already lived several lifetimes inside a single career. No one had ever moved quite the way she moved, and no one had done it with such apparent ease. Every genre she touched, she inhabited fully. Every song she picked up, she seemed to have always known. When Walt Disney Records … Read more
By the time you reach the final track of Linda Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheel, you have been through something. The album, released in November 1974, is not an easy ride — it moves through betrayal, longing, and the grinding work of keeping yourself together when things keep falling apart. Ronstadt tears through “You’re No … Read more
The song “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” from Zevon’s 1976 self-titled debut album — a record built on sardonic wit, emotional damage, and a very particular kind of Southern California darkness. Zevon had written it as a friendly jab at the “woe is me” earnestness that dominated the singer-songwriter scene, the melancholy circles around figures like … Read more
In 1951, Hank Williams walked into Castle Studio in Nashville with his Drifting Cowboys and laid down a song so plainspoken, so undefended in its ache, that it felt less like a composition than a confession. “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You)” rose to number two on the Billboard country … Read more
Neil Young had written “Love Is a Rose” in 1974 for an album called Homegrown, which he ultimately shelved and did not release to the public until 2020. His own recording sat in a vault. He offered the song to Ronstadt, and she took it immediately. Her version appeared as the B-side to “Heat Wave” … Read more
It was the summer of 1975, and Linda Ronstadt made something that felt inevitable — a record called Prisoner in Disguise, recorded between February and June 1975 at The Sound Factory in Hollywood, produced by Peter Asher, and released that September. On it, she ranged freely across Motown, country, rock, and gospel, as if the … Read more
The fall of 1986 was a strange moment for animated film. Animation was widely considered a dying medium — the great Disney machine had gone quiet, and the idea of a hand-drawn children’s movie generating a genuine pop hit felt like a category error. So when Steven Spielberg was producing An American Tail, a story … Read more
“Hurt So Bad” was written by Teddy Randazzo, Bobby Weinstein, and Bobby Hart, and first recorded by Little Anthony & The Imperials for their album Goin’ Out of My Head, where it became a top ten hit and a top five R&B record. The original is a soul-pop ballad built on pleading — a man … Read more
By 1973, Linda Ronstadt was already on her fourth solo album and still hadn’t broken through in the way her talent demanded. Don’t Cry Now, released on Asylum Records on October 1, 1973, was her first record on the new label, her first with producer Peter Asher, and the album that would begin to reshape … Read more
J.D. Souther wrote “Faithless Love” while living with Ronstadt in Beachwood Canyon — the same interlocking world of relationships, collaborations, and creative debts that would produce the Eagles, half of the decade’s great California rock, and enough material for a very long novel. Souther was already one of the scene’s quiet architects: he co-wrote some … Read more