Linda Ronstadt - Mad Love

My wife grew up with her parents' copy of Simple Dreams (which is now part of my collection), so why choose Mad Love for my rambling thoughts?

Simple.

I wanted to, and it seemed like a good idea. Besides, over the past year I've managed to find an astonishing number of her albums in the dollar bin, and it's been an absolute joy listening to them for the first time and discovering an artist I knew only from the killer guitar solo on "You're No Good." From there it led me to albums by Andrew Gold and Karla Bonoff.

It's weird looking back now and realizing that in 1980 Linda was still only in her early 30s and had already been releasing albums for over a decade. A decade in kid years, from a developmental perspective, is kind of like measuring things in dog years. In other words, when she released Mad Love she had been around FOR-EVVVVVER. Of course, looking at it now, it was a blink of an eye.

When I spotted this one in the bin, I scanned the back cover, which had apparently seen some water. I didn't recognize the song titles, but after getting it home and giving it a clean, I popped it on. Right out of the gate it was starting off really strong. Reading through the credits, there were still some familiar faces, but there also seemed to be a new crop of writers and players.

Guitars were handled for the most part by Dan Dugmore and Mark Goldenberg, who also wrote a number of the songs. The rhythm section of Russ Kunkel on drums and Bob Glaub on bass provides a solid anchor for the album.

Linda recorded three songs by Elvis Costello, who back in 1979 was still that nerdy new wave guy who wasn't yet an elder statesman. They're very good songs. Musically, there's a sense of change in the air. The songs lean a little more toward new wave without taking away from what makes Linda Ronstadt Linda Ronstadt (yeah, I think of her as her own genre). You get the sense that she's aware changes are afoot in music, and while she's riding the wave, she's still going to do her own thing, picking and choosing what she wants to incorporate into her musical zeitgeist (I think I used that correctly). Which makes it so cool to hear songs like "I Can't Let Go" and "Hurt So Bad" that were written in 1965. Yeah, I had to check that too - I never would have guessed.

Looking back now at her career, I find it kind of strange she wasn't more on my radar. Then again, my teenage rock-and-roll brain was probably a bit misogynistic, and I had very few female-fronted rock albums. Sure, I liked songs by Heart and Pat Benatar, but when I thought rock and roll, I didn't think of girls. Heck, I'll admit I came close to buying The Runaways when they came out because that shit rocked - but I probably opted for a Thin Lizzy record instead. I think it was Jail Break.

Throughout her career Linda Ronstadt managed to carve out a path that was always about the music. She wasn't limited to a specific genre or style, and she'd often vary her approach from album to album. There was a crunch to her music that allowed her to cross musical boundaries and be embraced by both camps. None of this would have been possible without the voice. She could snarl, purr, and caress a note in a way that set her in a league of her own.

After spinning Mad Love a couple more times while writing this, I can provide a better answer to why I chose to write about it: There are no bad Linda Ronstadt albums, just different points in time when people become fans. While it's true I didn't become a fan with this album, I was a fan when I bought it, and it was worth far more than the dollar I had to pay.

If you have the chance to watch the 2019 documentary The Sound of My Voice, it will be time well spent.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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