Going beyond culinary matters
Linda Ronstadt’s ‘Feels Like Home’ is a valentine to family and her Mexican heritage
Linda Ronstadt encountered a pivotal problem when she teamed up with former New York Times writer Lawrence Downes to pen a cookbook featuring some 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 turn it into a book about the Sonoran desert and how it’s strikingly the same on either side (Mexico and the U.S.), even though they put that border fence in the middle of it.”
The result is “Feels Like Home: Song for the Sonoran Borderlands,” which was recently published 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 is eloquently told by a singer who has devoted much of her career 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 with her family in Tucson.
The book inspired a companion album of the same name, recently released from Putumayo World Records, curated by Ronstadt and Putumayo founder Dan Storper.
The 10-track collection features songs performed by her and such artists as Lalo Guerrero, Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos.
“We worked on the album for many months because we wanted to make sure it was what Linda wanted,” Storper said. “The CD includes a 24-page booklet with photos, some excerpts from her book and her comments about each of the songs. The way Linda expresses herself is the heart and soul of who she is.”
Hearing Ronstadt’s luminous voice in full flight on the “Feels Like Home” compilation album will likely be an emotional experience for many 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.
Her singing career came to an abrupt end, and her life was profoundly changed. Previously easy tasks, such as eating or brushing her teeth, are now challenges that require considerable concentration. Walking is difficult, and she uses hearing aids, although she attributes the latter simply as a sign of growing old.
“I can always harmonize in my head, even without music playing,” Ronstadt said, speaking 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 both a labor of love and a labor.
“I can’t type,” she said matterof-factly. “That’s another reason I needed a lot of help with this book.
I have a lot of involuntary moments because of Parkinson’s and progressive supranuclear palsy.
So, it was slow going. It wasn’t this bad when I was writing (her 2013 memoir) ‘Simple Dreams,’ because my condition wasn’t as advanced as it is now.”
Downes, the co-author of
“Feels Like Home,” elaborated on Ronstadt’s condition in an interview from his New York home. “Linda can type, but very slowly and her fingers tremble,” he said. “She has an iPad and a MacBook that she types on, but it’s hard for her.”
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 wrote it in her voice,” he said. “I was never with her in the recording studio. But based on everything I’ve heard, the way she did this book is very similar to how she made records. She’s very particular about her singing voice and her written voice.”
While “Feels Like Home’s” focus goes far beyond culinary matters, the book does features
20 of Ronstadt’s favorite family recipes. They range from traditional Sonoran cheese soup and chiltepin salsa to carne asada and a more contemporary dish called tunapenos, which are jalepenos stuffed with tuna.
“I learned about them from my sister-in-law, Jackie. ‘What is this gringo food?’ I asked her. I was just shocked,” Ronstadt writes of her first encounter with tunapenos. “And then I ate one, and I went: ‘Okay, I am eating up the whole plate.’ ”
Her new 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 same on either side of the border and so were many of the people.
“For me,” Ronstadt writes in “Feels Like Home,” “Spanish was the language you got scolded and praised in, and the language you sang in. Since I always sang in Spanish, it was always more natural for me to sing it than to speak it.”
Discrimination was rampant in Tucson, she writes. But because of her complexion, she was not subjected to the biases that her darker-skinned Latina friends and classmates encountered on a regular basis.
“If you are white, it’s different,” Ronstadt said in response to a question about her ability to pass. “I had very light skin and a German surname, so it was easy for people to think I wasn’t Mexican.”
How easy or difficult was it for Ronstadt and her co-author to weave together the array of different themes that course together throughout “Feels Like Home?”
“Well, it was hard,” she replied. “But it was a true collaboration. People are just on the other side of the border (in Mexico), and it’s a wonderful culture with wonderful people, food and music.”
Asked what message in her book she hopes will most resonate with readers, Ronstadt replied: “That (Mexicans) are just people, really nice people, especially in that particular (Sonoran Desert) valley.”