Linda Ronstadt encountered a pivotal problem when she teamed up with former Latest York Times author Lawrence Downes to pen a cookbook featuring a few of her family’s favorite recipes.
“It didn’t come together because I don’t cook!” said Ronstadt, 76, a National Medal of Arts recipient, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee and 11-time Grammy Award-winner.
“So, we decided to show it right into a book in regards to the Sonoran desert and the way it’s strikingly the identical on either side (Mexico and the U.S.), despite the fact that they put that border fence in the midst of it.”
The result’s “Feels Like Home: Song for the Sonoran Borderlands,” which will likely be published Oct. 4 by Heyday and sometimes reads like several books intertwined into one.
Enhanced by the vivid photography of Bill Stein, a longtime Ronstadt friend, “Feels Like Home” is a celebration of culture, music, geography, food and family ties that know no borders. It’s eloquently told by a singer who has devoted much of her profession to transcending musical borders, from country, rock and jazz standards to Broadway musicals, opera and the Mexican folklorico music she grew up singing in Arizona along with her family in Tucson.
The book — about which more in a moment — inspired a companion album of the identical name, due out Friday from Putamayo World Records, curated by Ronstadt and Putamayo founder Dan Storper.
The ten-song collection features songs performed by her and such past and present musical pals as Lalo Guerrero, Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos and members of the Bay Area-based Mexican folk music group Los Cenzontles (The Mockingbirds).
“We worked on the album for a lot of months because we desired to be certain it was what Linda wanted,” Putamayo honcho Storper said.
“The CD features a 24-page booklet with photos, some excerpts from her book and her comments about each of the songs. The way in which Linda expresses herself is the center and soul of who she is.”
Luminous voice silenced
Hearing Ronstadt’s luminous voice in full flight on the “Feels Like Home” compilation album will likely be an emotional experience for a lot of listeners.
Her final concert was a 2009 performance of songs from her Mariachi music-celebrating 1987 release, “Canciones de Mi Padre” (“Songs of My Father”), the top-selling non-English language album in U.S. history. She made her last recording, a collaboration with Ry Cooder and The Chieftains, in 2010.
Ronstadt was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2012. Her condition was rediagnosed in 2019 as also having progressive supranuclear palsy, an incurable degenerative disease.
Under either name, her singing profession got here to an abrupt end and her life was profoundly modified. Previously easy tasks, reminiscent of eating or brushing her teeth, at the moment are challenges that require considerable concentration for this genre-leaping vocal legend. Walking is difficult and she or he uses hearing aids, although she attributes the latter simply as an indication of growing old.
“I can all the time harmonize in my head, even without music playing,” Ronstadt said, speaking by phone from her San Francisco home. “That’s all I can do. I can’t sing.”
Happily, her voice rings loud and clear on nearly every page of “Feels Like Home,” which was each a labor of affection and a labor.
“I can’t type,” she said matter-of-factly.
“That’s another excuse I needed loads of help with this book. I even have loads of involuntary moments due to Parkinson’s and progressive supranuclear palsy. So, it was slow going. It wasn’t this bad once I was writing (her 2013 memoir) ‘Easy Dreams,’ because my condition wasn’t as advanced because it is now.”
Downes, the co-author of “Feels Like Home,” elaborated on Ronstadt’s condition in an interview from his Latest York home on Long Island.
“Linda can type, but very slowly and her fingers tremble,” he said. “She has an iPad and a MacBook that she types on, however it’s hard for her.”
Writing side by side
Even so, Ronstadt was completely hands on as she and Downes wrote and honed “Feels Like Home” side by side in her San Francisco home.
“I wasn’t ghostwriting or taking dictation. It’s her story and she or he wrote it in her voice,” he said.
“We went over the manuscript multiple times. I had my laptop and she or he had a print-out in a three-ring binder. We went through it page by page, after which we’d do it again — and again.
“I used to be never along with her within the recording studio. But based on every little thing I’ve heard, the way in which she did this book may be very just like how she made records. She’s very particular about her singing voice and her written voice. She might have been an excellent author.”
Does Ronstadt envision doing one other book?
“No!” she said. “It’s too hard.”
While “Feels Like Home’s” focus goes far beyond culinary matters, including some heartfelt political commentary, the book does features 20 of Ronstadt’s favorite family recipes. They vary from traditional Sonoran cheese soup and chiltepin salsa to carne asada and a more contemporary dish called tunapenos, that are jalepenos full of tuna.
“I learned about them from my sister-in-law, Jackie. ‘What is that this gringo food?’ I asked her. I used to be just shocked,” Ronstadt writes of her first encounter tunapenos. “After which I ate one and I went: ‘Okay, I’m eating up the entire plate.’”
Letter to the pope
The book also features a chapter entitled “Wait a Minute, Your Holiness,” which recounts the letter she and her friend, Reverend Mary Moreno-Richardson, sent to Pope Francis seven years ago.
“Once I learned in 2015 that Pope Francis had apologized to Indigenous peoples for the brutal harm done to them by the Catholic Church in colonial times but was also about to canonize the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, certainly one of the brutalizers, the dissonance was an excessive amount of to bear,” she writes.
The letter concludes: “Our concern is that to canonize him wouldn’t only be an affront to the California Indians that survive, it will tarnish the pictures of the saints we cherish. We implore you to reconsider the canonization of Junípero Serra.”
Serra was indeed canonized later in 2015. Did Ronstadt expect Pope Francis to reply to her written plea?
“I’m sure he never saw my letter,” she said. “But I felt I needed to put in writing it irrespective of and put it within the book.”
Ronstadt sputtered good-naturedly when asked if she was now not a practicing Catholic.
“I’m a practicing atheist,” Ronstadt said. “But I like this pope and I feel he would do more if he could. I feel he’d let priests marry and would (OK) gay marriage.”
The topic of indigenous peoples is near and dear to her heart.
Ronstadt’s grandfather, Federico Jose Maria Ronstadt, was born within the Sonoran town of Banamichi. He migrated to her hometown of Tucson — about 200 miles to the north — within the early Eighties.
Her latest 218-page memoir is a valentine to her family and the Mexican heritage she has long celebrated in words and music.
Growing up, Ronstadt and her family traveled often and freely between southern Arizona and northern Mexico. The physical landscape was the identical on either side of the border and so were most of the people.
“For me,” Ronstadt writes in “Mi Pueblo,” “Feels Like Home’s” fourth chapter, “Spanish was the language you bought scolded and praised in, and the language you sang in. Since I all the time sang in Spanish, it was all the time more natural for me to sing it than to talk it.”