Linda Ronstadt * Record Producer *

[the Scribe]

playlist:
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxB20vl7yJz0fHUETDg9EoC33_ylV6Ovv

David Lindley & El Rayo-X
Very Greasy

Produced by Linda Ronstadt
1988

1. Gimme da' ting
2. I just can't work no longer
3. Do ya' wanna dance?
4. Talk about you
5. Papa was a rolling stone
6. Werewolves of London
7. Texas tango
8. Never knew her
9. Talkin' to the wino too
10. Tiki torches at twilight

[the Scribe]

Aaron Neville
Warm Your Heart

Produced by Linda Ronstadt
and George Massenburg
1991

playlist:
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1aHoi5AK3KLBrvDb3HAa-G6f8RlCpnmC

1. Louisiana 1927
2. Everybody Plays the Fool
3. It Feels Like Rain
4. Somewhere, Somebody
5. Don't Go Please Stay
6. With You in Mind
7. That's the Way She Loves
8. Angola Bound
9. Close Your Eyes
10. La Vie Dansante
11. Warm Your Heart
12. I Bid You Goodnight
13. Ave Maria



Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville
Ron Givens
August 17, 1990 AT 04:00 AM EDT

On the face of it, Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville couldn’t be more dissimilar. She’s a pale, diminutive Arizonan of Mexican and German heritage. He’s a dark, barrel-chested Louisianan, an African-American steeped in the rich musical traditions of New Orleans. At 44, Ronstadt has sold millions of albums as a rock singer and tackled an array of musical genres, from heavily orchestrated pop to country-western to Mexican mariachi to light operetta. At 49, Neville has been more successful with critics than record buyers, consistently producing, as part of the Neville Brothers, the sinuous funk that has made New Orleans R&B famous. These distinctions are forgotten, however, once Ronstadt and Neville begin to sing together. Something magical happens when Ronstadt’s buttermilk soprano meets Neville’s creamy falsetto. ”We don’t sing the same style at all,” Ronstadt says, ”but when we sing up high together we just blend.”



Those sweet harmonies soared to unexpected heights last year. Ronstadt and Neville recorded four duets for her solo album Cry Like a Rainstorm — Howl Like the Wind and became the First Couple of pop music. In 10 months Cry has sold nearly two million copies, and three of the Ronstadt-Neville tunes have been chart hits: ”Don’t Know Much,” which peaked at No. 2 before winning a Grammy for the duo in February, ”All My Life,” and ”When Something Is Wrong With My Baby.”



Since then the collaboration has deepened. Ronstadt is making her debut as a producer on Neville’s upcoming solo album, half of which was recorded in New Orleans this spring. And last week Ronstadt and Neville were reunited in concert, on her first rock & roll tour since 1981. Neville is singing duets with Ronstadt on the tour, as well as performing with the Neville Brothers as her opening act.

Ronstadt has been an Aaron Neville fan for a long time, but she didn’t meet him until 1984. ”I was in New Orleans singing with Nelson Riddle,” she remembers, ”and we went to see the Neville Brothers — what else do you do when you’re in New Orleans?” Neville dedicated a song to Ronstadt and invited her onstage to sing along on a doo-wop medley. ”I was just sort of oohing on top,” she says. Afterward, she asked for Neville’s autograph. ”She told me, ‘I’ll sing with you and record with you anytime,”’ says Neville. Getting into the studio was easier said than done. Despite frequent attempts to coordinate their busy schedules, Ronstadt and Neville didn’t manage to record together until last year.

Choosing songs for the duets proved nearly as difficult. Ronstadt won’t record any type of music she wasn’t familiar with ”by the time I was five or six,” she says. ”That’s what I can authentically express. I’ve had a lifetime to use it and have it go through my neurological patterns and mean something in my life.” As the variety of her work in the ’80s indicates, she did a lot of listening when she was a kid. After an extensive search for material that would be true to both herself and Neville, Ronstadt called upon a variety of composers — a California singer-songwriter, British pub-rockers, New York songsmiths, and old-fashioned soul masters — for four tender love songs.

DUETS - LINDA RONSTADT AARON NEVILLE

www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXpPxMNrJk_u11pRXf9vtky53kC2AwIkO

For the Neville solo album, Ronstadt studied the music of New Orleans. ”Aaron asked me to help him find material,” she says before launching into a discussion of his hometown. Ronstadt speaks eagerly of the blend of French, Spanish, and West African cultures in the Crescent City, and tosses off references to the importance of music in such rituals as Mardi Gras. At times she even sounds like a musicologist: ”I’m convinced that (New Orleans singer- pianist) Professor Longhair is the beginning of rock & roll.” While scouting for Neville tunes, Ronstadt has also been researching her next two solo projects: a second album of mariachi music and an album of big-band R&B, à la Ray Charles’ ”Drown in My Own Tears.”

Neville wants his new album to remain true to his New Orleans roots, while flexing some musical muscles away from his family band. ”There’s a lot of stuff inside of me that I want to get out,” he says. The religious song ”Ave Maria,” for example, is something that he can sing in the bathtub, but not in the middle of a funky Neville Brothers show. As producer, Ronstadt says, ”I’m trying to serve two masters, because I would like to make a record that could get played on the radio. But I’ve never made any of my records that way.”

Ronstadt hopes that the Neville solo album will be a commercial success because he’s never made much money from his recordings. ”Even when ‘Tell It Like It Is’ was a big hit (No. 2 in 1967), he was loading coffee into ships,” she says. Ronstadt also wants him to become famous: ”I’m surprised when people say I uncovered this man. It never occurred to me that housewives in Cincinnati have never heard of him. I thought I was following on his coattails.” Neville’s guest appearance on her album introduced him to more listeners. The Grammy Awards, which included a Ronstadt-Neville performance just before they won, also helped. ”It was one of the greatest feelings in the world,” Neville remembers. ”I was thinking about all the people back home. I felt like I was winning it for New Orleans.”



Maybe that sounds sentimental, but that’s the way Neville sings. ”Sometimes I want to make it so tender it can wipe out anything negative in people’s lives,” he says. When Neville sang the theme from The Mickey Mouse Club on Stay Awake, a 1988 Disney tribute album, he made that sappy number a heartbreaker. ”It makes me feel like a child when I’m doing it,” he says.

Neville follows his instincts, and so does Ronstadt. ”Music for me is the personal thing that goes on in my living room, or someone else’s living room, or when my hands are in the dishwater,” she says. ”It’s something I do to organize the more chaotic aspects of my life into something meaningful. It’s how I try to understand life. When I was a little child, I didn’t wonder if anybody was listening.”

Neville isn’t surprised that he and Ronstadt have harmonized successfully. For him, the differences between them aren’t great at all. ”I think our singing together was meant to be,” he says. ”We have the same type of heart.”

[the Scribe]

Jimmy Webb
Suspending Disbelief

Produced by Linda Ronstadt
and George Massenburg
1993

playlist:
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs0tk0PzcboQ-iiy0phKULDZls_XyHgIF

1. Too Young to Die
2. I Don't Know How to Love You Anymore
3. Elvis and Me
4. It Won't Bring Her Back
5. Sandy Cove
6. Friends to Burn
7. What Does a Woman See In A Man
8. Postcards From Paris
9. Just Like Always
10. Adios
11. I Will Arise


RECORDINGS VIEW; For Jimmy Webb, The Loss of Youth Is Bittersweet
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: September 26, 1993

Mr. Webb, who is 47, has had as odd a career as any songwriter of his generation. A minister's son from Elk City, Okla., he became the hottest songwriter in Hollywood at the age of 21 through a succession of hits for Glen Campbell ("By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman," "Galveston"), the Fifth Dimension ("Up, Up and Away") and Richard Harris ("MacArthur Park," "Didn't We"). Since storm-tossed ballads were the farthest thing from hip in the heyday of the rock counterculture, Mr. Webb has always been viewed as a transitional figure between the old and new guards of pop songwriting. (He will appear tomorrow at Avery Fisher Hall for an evening of his songs with Nanci Griffith, Glen Campbell, David Crosby and Michael Feinstein.)

"MacArthur Park," with its symphonic bombast and its surreal image of a cake melting in the rain, remains the most notorious example of a late-60's song that tried to fuse two antithetical musical worlds.

Since his early fame, Mr. Webb has turned out a large body of work that blurs the line between traditional and contemporary. His songs have found especially ardent champions in Art Garfunkel and in Ms. Ronstadt, who included several Webb compositions on her 1989 pop album, "Cry Like a Rainstorm -- Howl Like the Wind."

Because Ms. Ronstadt shares Mr. Webb's romantic sensibility, his respect for traditional pop forms and his Los Angeles pop background, she is truly a kindred soul. And the album she and her producing collaborator, George Massenburg, have made with Mr. Webb finds a seemless blend of symphonic dreaminess and modern Hollywood cool. Mr. Webb's impassioned but quirky singing, which has never been smooth enough for pop radio, has a gritty rough-hewn authority

"Suspending Disbelief," which is Mr. Webb's first album in more than a decade, is one long bittersweet goodbye to old loves, family ghosts and Hollywood fantasies.

"Our dreams of endless summer were just too grandiose," he reflects in "Adios," a brooding farewell to southern California with its "blood red sunsets" and hours whiled away "drinking Margaritas all night in the old cantina."

The narrator of "Too Young to Die" looks back nostalgically on a reckless youth spent in a "sweet old racing car," tempting fate and emulating James Dean and Steve McQueen. "Elvis and Me" gives a fan's blow-by-blow account of an evening spent with Presley, who invites him backstage after a show and then to a celebrity-packed party in his Las Vegas penthouse suite. Many years later, the fan, as star-struck as ever, fantasizes that he could have saved Elvis's life if the star had only telephoned him.

In the beautiful but bleak song "Sandy Cove," a man standing on the beach beside a crumbling old tower, remembers some family artifacts that have vanished and feels an intense sorrow. "Where does all the love we lose go?" he wonders, as he is seized with a longing to have lived his life differently. In the song's final verse he compares himself to the weather-beaten edifice next to him, one with cracks in its mortar and holes in its bricks, and muses, "It's something I can't fix."

There is an astonishing consistency of tone between these mature ballads and Mr. Webb's earliest hits. From the beginning, a disproportionate number of Mr. Webb's songs have recognized the perfect moment and lamented its passing. In the old days, it could be a balloon disappearing into the sky ("Up, Up and Away") or a soggy cake ("MacArthur Park").

Now, it is youth itself that has gone. But in contemplating physical and emotional erosion, his music still keens with the old youthful longing. The contrast makes for an album that may very well be the songwriter's perfect moment.

[the Scribe]

Dennis James
CRISTAL
Glass Music through the ages

Produced by Linda Ronstadt
and John Boylan
2001

playlist:
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMRtI0HB3kR26D0yMuM37ngZi3VePiFro

1. Irish Lullaby
2. Quintet- Dance
3. Quintet- Song
4. Quintet- Brisk
5. Non Temere Alma Immortale
6. Allegro
7. Caprice
8. Pavane, Op.50 Pavane, Op.50
9. Largo In G Minor
10. O Cessate Di Piagarmi
11. Adagio In C Major, K.356
12. Adagio
13. Rondo
14. Adagio
15. Andantino
16. Petite Impression

Ronstadt turns co-producer (with John Boylan) in 2002 for the release of a Sony Classical disc by glass armonica virtuoso Dennis James, with whom she first worked on “Winter Light.” The other-worldly sounding instrument was invented by Benjamin Franklin. Ronstadt sings a pair of Italian classics on the disc, which also features operatic soprano Ruth Ann Swenson and French singer Veronique Dietsche.

Though it was her first classical co-production, Ronstadt had previously produced or co-produced discs for Aaron Neville, Jimmy Webb and David Lindley. The Neville recording, “Warm Your Heart,” co-produced with George Massenburg, featured the hit “Everybody Plays the Fool.”

[eddiejinnj]

Linda has whistling credits on EPTF. Pretty cool. The album "Warm Your Heart" went to number 44 ( US Billboard) and was certified Platinum. EPTF went to number 8 (billboard Hot 100 ) and Billboard AC Number 1 hit. Other than "Tell It Like It Is" from 1966, it seems to be the biggest hit for him. Wiki says he had 4 Top Ten singles but I checked the Billboard site and for the Top 100 and he has 3. TILII, DKM (with Linda) and EPTF. eddiejinfl