Linda Ronstadt Celebrates Her Heritage With Memoir, ‘Feels Like Home’: Excerpt
by Best Classic Bands Staff
Linda Ronstadt announced a new memoir in March 2021 and it’s finally on its way. In the stunning book, Feels Like Home: A Song For the Sonoran Borderlands, arriving on October 4, 2022 (Nov. 22 in the U.K.) via Heyday Books, she shares a “magical panorama of the high desert, offering a personal tour built around meals and memories of the place where she came of age. Growing up the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants and a descendant of Spanish settlers near northern Sonora, Ronstadt’s intimate new memoir celebrates the marvelous flavors and indomitable people on both sides of what was once a porous border whose denizens were happy to exchange recipes and gather around campfires to sing the ballads that shaped Ronstadt’s musical heritage.”
The book “seamlessly braids together Ronstadt’s recollections of people and their passions in a region little understood in the rest of the United States. This road trip through the desert, co-written with her friend and former New York Times journalist Lawrence Downes and illustrated throughout with beautiful photographs by Bill Steen, features recipes for traditional Sonoran dishes and a bevy of revelations for Ronstadt’s admirers.”
A companion CD of songs that have inspired Ronstadt, including several of her own performances and others featuring Jackson Browne, Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, is being released on Sept. 30 via Putumayo Music.
The book’s publisher has allowed Best Classic Bands to exclusively excerpt Ronstadt’s comments on many of the musical inspirations for the book, of songs that are featured on the album, Feels Like Home: Songs from the Sonoran Borderlands — Linda Ronstadt’s Musical Odyssey.
Of “I Will Never Marry,” which she recorded with Dolly Parton on her Simple Dreams album, she notes, “Dolly and I both love this song. According to Ronstadt family rules, this was my sister’s song, because she was the first of us to sing it.” She cheekily adds, “But Suzy married three times, so it became mine.”
“My brother Mike wrote and recorded [‘Canadian Moon’] with his band, Ronstadt Generations,” she writes. “It’s my favorite song of his. It came to him in Canada, naturally, where everything is so green and lush it can make a homesick Tucsonan cry. This song shows the hold the desert can have on you.”
“When I introduced Jackson Browne to Eugene Rodriguez and his cultural organization Los Cenzontles, I felt they would hit it off. Jackson and Eugene soon teamed up to write this beautiful song,” she says of “The Dreamer,” “about a family divided by the border and our unjust immigration laws.”
“My brothers, Peter and Mike, sang this beautiful huapango folk song [‘El Sueño’] with me on my record Mas Canciones. We learned the harmonies as kids from a record by Trio Tariácuri, three brothers who were beloved musicians in Mexico for decades, starting in the 1930s.”
Of “Barrio Viejo,” of the song meaning “Old Neighborhood,” she writes, “The great Chicano bandleader and songwriter Lalo Guerrero never forgot how Tucson bulldozed and buried his old neighborhood in the 1960s, in the name of urban renewal. In 1990, this song brought it back to life. He was in his seventies then, still working at the top of his talent, and this may be his greatest song.” Guerrero performs it here with Ry Cooder.
[The above notes on Linda Ronstadt’s musical inspiration are excerpted from her memoir Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands © Linda Ronstadt, Lawrence Downes, and Bill Steen, with permission from the publisher Heyday Books. A companion album, Feels Like Home: Songs from the Sonoran Borderlands — Linda Ronstadt’s Musical Odyssey, features select songs from the book and is available from Putumayo World Music.]
Ronstadt, born July 15, 1946, is one of the most versatile singers in popular music, and the author of Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir (2013). Her four-decade recording career encompassed country, rock ‘n’ roll, the Great American Songbook, jazz, opera, Broadway standards, Mexican and Tropical music and Americana. Her worldwide sales totaled more than 100 million records, with more than 30 gold and platinum records. She has won 11 Grammy Awards and is a recipient of the National Medal of Arts and a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She serves on the advisory board of Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy, which has taught Mexican folk music, dance and art to children in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than three decades.
Downes is a writer and editor in New York. For more than thirty years, he worked in newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, Newsday, and the New York Times where he was an editor and member of the editorial board, specializing in issues about immigration, New York City and state politics and government, disability rights, veterans affairs, and the environment.
Steen is a professional photographer, specializing in the beauty and bounty of the Sonoran borderlands for more than three decades.
“Feels Like Home” is a Randy Newman composition that Ronstadt previously recorded in 1994 for her Trio II album with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. She also made it the title cut of her 1995 solo album.
Related: Our Album Rewind of the original trio album with Ronstadt, Parton and Harris
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3 Comments so far
Jump into a conversationLinda is my all time favorite female singer!! I have her first book and looking forward to her new one soon!!
Love her voice and the songs Linda sings written by Karla Bonoff.
LInda’s version of “Heat Wave” is the best.
GOAT. Her music changed my life. I was looking for pedal steel players when I found her and I tried to learn every song she ever sang!!!!!