Linda Ronstadt – It’s So Easy

In the autumn of 1977, Linda Ronstadt was at the peak of something difficult to name precisely. Not just fame. Not just commercial success. It was that rare state a handful of artists reach — when a voice and an era converge so completely that every song they touch comes alive in a different way.

Simple Dreams, her eighth album, arrived that September and promptly knocked Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours off the number one spot on the Billboard album chart — a record that had held its position for 29 consecutive weeks. From that album came two singles in the top five simultaneously — “Blue Bayou” and “It’s So Easy” — making Ronstadt the first female artist, and the first act overall since the Beatles, to pull that off. And yet, buried inside that triumph is a strange fact: “It’s So Easy” was never really supposed to exist.

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The song was written by Buddy Holly and producer Norman Petty, recorded with The Crickets at Norman Petty Recording Studios in Clovis, New Mexico during the summer of 1958. Brunswick Records released it as a single, and it charted nowhere. It was the final Crickets release while Holly was still alive — he died in a plane crash in February 1959.

Nearly two decades later, Ronstadt needed something loud and fast to balance out the slower, more introspective material on Simple Dreams. She told PopMatters it was “an afterthought that we threw in.” Songs with nuance and subtlety, she explained, got lost in the big arenas. She needed something that could fill a room.

When a Voice Finds the Soul of a Song

What Ronstadt did with “It’s So Easy” wasn’t a revival. It was a liberation. She didn’t approach it as a Holly artifact to be preserved. She came at it as though it had always been hers — a piece of music that lived somewhere inside her already. She told PopMatters she built her performance around where the song came from: “It’s Texarkana. I grew up listening to that. It’s kind of country, it’s kind of rock ‘n’ roll, it’s kind of blues. It’s a little bit of all those things.” And her voice does exactly that — carrying the dusty wind of the Texas border, the rough intimacy of the blues, the bright crack of early rock ‘n’ roll — all at once, without explanation, without apology.

The studio band settles into a groove that feels like dirt and gravel. Don Grolnick on clavinet adds a small electric twist without stripping the song of its backbone. Waddy Wachtel on electric guitar, bassist Kenny Edwards, and drummer Rick Marotta sink into the track like it’s somewhere they’ve always lived.

But above all of it, Ronstadt’s voice cuts through — not smoothed out, not wrapped in anything soft. It growls. It pushes. There’s something in the way she delivers even the simplest lines — “People say that love’s a game / a game you just can’t win” — that makes them land like anything but simple. She isn’t singing about an idea. She’s remembering something from the bone.

This is where the song creates its strange illusion. The lyrics insist that loving is easy — and Ronstadt sings them with the full authority of someone who knows perfectly well that nothing is. That tension — between what the words claim and what the voice reveals — is the song’s real center. It smiles at you while its eyes say something else entirely. That isn’t irony. It’s understanding.

A Song That Knows How to Travel

“It’s So Easy” climbed to number five on the Billboard Hot 100, reached number nine in Canada and number eleven in the United Kingdom. But the numbers only tell part of the story. The rest lives in what the song does after the charts forget about it. In 2005, director Ang Lee placed it inside Brokeback Mountain — a film about love that has to hide itself, about the distance between what people feel and what they’re allowed to say. In that setting, the song carries an entirely new layer. Its bright surface becomes a kind of cover, and the low growl inside Ronstadt’s voice suddenly rings out like a confession.

That is what a real song can do. It walks into new rooms and behaves differently — not because it changes, but because the listener brings a different life to it. Holly built the frame. Ronstadt filled it with enough open space for anyone to step inside.

Today, when the song opens — that guitar riff sharp as a stone tapped against glass — and Ronstadt’s voice comes in with the certainty of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing, something becomes very clear. This was no accident. This is what happens when a song finds the right hands. Holly put it down. Ronstadt picked it up. And the song, at last, found out what it was.