LINDA RONSTADT
SIMPLE DREAMS
UDCD 785
• Grammy Nominations for Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female
• Five consecutive weeks as the No. 1 record on the Billboard Album Chart
• Two Top 10 Singles
Linda Ronstadt just couldn't lose. Another of her interpretive masterworks, 1977's stunning Simple Dreams continued a creative streak that found the singer turning out album after album of incredible material at an astonishing one-per-year rate until she finally began to come back down to earth in the early 1980s.
Paired again with expert producer and arranger Peter Asher, Ronstadt delves into even deeper emotional waters to convey the feelings associated with loss, fantasy, risk, and romance. Her choice of material is simultaneously appropriate and bold. The singer's smash cover of Roy Orbison's “Blue Bayou” - which remains the definitive version - sits alongside an edgy reinvention of the Rolling Stones' “Tumbling Dice.” As she does on the latter, Ronstadt also turns the tables on a smoking rendition of Warren Zevon's “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.” With her strong female presence, she puts a woman in the power position on a male-dominant song. On Simple Dreams, she not only joins the elite boy's club - she runs it.
Electrifying country-rock threads run throughout the album, which features a host of top-notch musicians that include fiddler David Lindley, Neil Young associate Spooner Oldham, guitarist Waddy Wachtel, and a superb horn section. As all great session performers do, they invisibly blend into the song, and allow Ronstadt's singing to carry. And it's not just her voice but her way with words, phrasing, and tones. She takes every song personally. Whether conveying sympathy, sadness, loneliness, or - as on her remarkable roots duet with Dolly Parton on the traditional “I Will Never Marry” - proud independence, the feelings are her own. Every note brims with conviction, passion, and understanding.
Packed in New Numbered Limited Edition Mini LP Style Packaging!
1. It's So Easy
2. Carmelita
3. Simple Man, Simple Dream
4. Sorrow Lives Here
5. I Never Will Marry
6. Blue Bayou
7. Poor Poor Pitiful Me
8. Maybe I'm Right
9. Tumbling Dice
10. Old Paint
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