Linda Ronstadt has run through three different producers with her last three albums, and it's easy to see why she wears them out so fast. Of the three, not one of them has had much luck with the considerable job of imposing any direction or discipline on Linda's seemingly boundless raw energy. She has yet to find someone who can shape up a whole album to match the best of her individual performances on isolated cuts.
touch ("Will You Love Me Tomorrow") of mainstream pop; it had a few moments of erratic brilliance that may well be the best things she's done so far ("Long, Long Time," "Mental Revenge"). Like its predecessor, it was uneven but made up for weak moments with the passion and energy that give Linda driving force in all her best moments.
This time she and her new producer, John Boylan, have evidently decided to tone things down some, and so the new repertoire emphasizes "Long, Long Time"-style ballads at the expense of the gutsier stuff she does so well. But what made "Long, Long Time" such a perfect song for Linda had very little to do with its slowed-down tempo or ballad style, but rather with the song's sense of the quiet, soulful passion she knows so well how to convey. When Linda sings the kind of material that shows up her tremendous emotional power, she can always be devastating–but when she tackles more remote and thoughtful songs, the energy is lost and the end-product curiously lifeless.
Neil Young's "Birds" and Liv Taylor's "In My Reply" are perfect illustrations of the kind of material that causes her problems; they're both heavily dependent on verbal tricks and nuances, but Linda's way of dealing with lyrical subtlety is simply to gloss over it as sweetly as she can. Her versions are fluid and melodic and always nice to listen to, but the meaning is gone. Jackson Browne's lovely "Rock Me On The Water," the album's opening cut, is lyrically dense enough to have led to the same problem but it has a strong gospel side for her to latch onto, and she catches the spirit of it well enough to do a beautiful job.
Linda has always done best with either strictly country songs or love-song soliloquies, and when it comes to songs that combine both styles she can even be best-and-a-half. The other standout moments of the album are her versions of "Crazy Arms" and Eric Andersen's "Faithful," each of which sounds like she both feels and understands it. "I Fall To Pieces" has much of the same kind of strength, but "I Won't Be Hangin' Round," "Ramblin' Round," and "I Still Miss Someone" come through slow and plain enough to get bogged down. The only really uptempo cut here is Linda's "Rescue Me," which sounds like it's going to be great u
