The singing superstar on the disease that stole her voice, celebrating her Mexican heritage and the stories behind her classic songs.
JIM FARBER SEP 9, 2022 | See the original article here.
Almost a decade ago, Linda Ronstadt was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. In 2019, her condition was rediagnosed as progressive supranuclear palsy, a degenerative, Parkinson’s-like disease for which there is no known cure. It robbed her of her distinctive soprano singing voice, ending a career that had made her one of the most popular and accomplished vocalists of her generation. A recipient of 11 Grammy Awards, plus the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016, she’s also in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor.
Almost a decade ago, Linda Ronstadt was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. In 2019, her condition was rediagnosed as progressive supranuclear palsy, a degenerative, Parkinson’s-like disease for which there is no known cure. It robbed her of her distinctive soprano singing voice, ending a career that had made her one of the most popular and accomplished vocalists of her generation. A recipient of 11 Grammy Awards, plus the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016, she’s also in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor.
Regardless of what has happened to her, music remains a key part of her life. “I can still sing in my mind,” she tells Parade. “Sometimes I have to look up the words, because I forget the lyrics. But then I’ll sing a song in my head all the way through, like a hummingbird.”
At the zenith of her superstardom in the 1970s and into the ’80s, Ronstadt was a pre-internet pop-culture darling. And not just for her hit songs. Her romances—with California Gov. Jerry Brown, with filmmaker George Lucas, with comedian Albert Brooks—also made headlines. She never married, and she successfully kept her two children, Mary and Carlos, both adopted in the 1990s, out of the spotlight.
Her career path was a wide-ranging odyssey across various musical forms and formats—pop, rock, country, folk, opera, classical and Latin—all grounded in her passion for music. These days, she says, “I listen mostly to opera. I love opera more than anything. I can listen to music really passionately now.”
Another passion, especially in recent years, has been doubling down to make clear to the world who she truly is. Born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, she was steeped in the music and culture of her father’s side of the family, whose roots were deep in Mexico. It frustrates her that, throughout her four-decade career, the media has seldom acknowledged her Southwestern heritage, even when she emphasized it by recording albums like Canciones de Mi Padre, her 1987 collection of traditional Mexican songs that became the biggest-selling non-English-language album in U.S. history.
To help correct that, two years ago she took part in a documentary, Linda and the Mockingbirds, which followed her on an emotional trip she took to the rural Mexican town of Banámichi, where her grandfather grew up. Now, Ronstadt, 74, is releasing the book she wrote with journalist Lawrence Downes, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands (Oct. 4), which illuminates the culture, food and natural wonders of the Sonoran Desert, which stretches from her Arizona childhood home through a large swatch of northern Mexico. A companion album of songs Ronstadt has admired, sung or recorded over the years, Feels Like Home: Songs From the Sonoran Borderlands—Linda Ronstadt’s Musical Odyssey, will be released Oct. 7.
Parade spoke with Ronstadt from her San Francisco home.
Your book celebrates the Sonoran region where you grew up. How did the desert shape you?
I grew up in a certain way, in a certain place. There weren’t trees. There wasn’t green everywhere and I got used to that. Even now, I don’t like to live where there are too many trees. I want to be able to see.
The book includes recipes from the area. What’s special about that food?
They didn’t have refrigeration, so the food had to be preserved by drying it or pickling it. They eat a lot of dried meat, dried fruit and pickled vegetables. But there’s very rich soil, so the vegetables taste better. It’s the breadbasket of Mexico. (Try Ronstadt’s Green Chile and Tomato Salsa recipe.)
Can you get that kind of food in Northern California?
I was always flabbergasted that in Mexican restaurants in the U.S. you can’t get good tortillas. What I didn’t realize was that you can’t get them in the rest of Mexico, either. In Sonora and the border states, they fluff them out like pizzadough. It gets so thin, you can see through it. And they taste delicious because they’re made with lard. Unless you grew up with that culture, you can’t make them right.
You have such a love of food, but you write in your book that you never learned to cook.
Well, I was living in a hotel for decades. Being on the road is not conducive to cooking. I was better at needlework, because I could take it with me on the road.
Your heritage has always been important to you but it’s coming to the fore more than ever now. Why?
Because I demand it. I used to give interviews when I was starting out, and they would say, “Where are you from?” And I would say, “I’m Mexican and German,” and they would say, “Oh, are you Spanish?” I would say, “No…Mexican.” That’s like mixing up Americans and Australians. It’s a totally different culture!
Your first album of Mexican songs became an enormous hit. Did that surprise you?
I have to be honest: I didn’t give it a thought. I just thought, I’m going to record these songs and I don’t care what they do with it. I felt I’d earned the right to do a “vanity project” [laughs]. I grew up singing that music, but those songs are hard to sing. I had to learn how to sing them on a professional level. That the album turned out to be a hit allowed me to do another [Mexican album], and it was better because I learned to sing those kinds of songs better.
What are your favorite Mexican songs?
“Mi Ranchito” [my little farm], about the ranch where I grew up. “El Sueño” [the dream], I recorded with my brothers—my older and younger brother. “El Fango” is utterly mysterious and fascinating to me. It’s a straight waltz, beautiful poetry.”
When you released those albums in the late 1980s and early ’90s, you sang with such power that it was almost unthinkable that you would ever lose that ability. But you seem to have been very accepting of that loss and of your disease.
Well, I don’t have a choice. If I had a choice, then I might be pissed off. I try not to live in the future. I live in the present. I mean, we’re all going to die of something, we just don’t know what it is. Even I don’t know what it is. Yes, I have a progressive disease, but I might get hit by a bus next week. I’ve been lucky. I have had a lot of really good help. My daughter is very helpful, so I’m well taken care of.
