Someone to Lay Down Beside Me

August 5, 2013 • 3:22 am

It’s summer and the living is easy, so let’s start the week with a song.

I can’t believe I haven’t posted this one before, but a quick check of the site says no.  Ergo, it’s time.

This is my favorite song in the Linda Ronstadt oeuvre (born 1946), though it was written by Karla Bonoff (born 1951), who deserves to be better known. Both the melody and words are melancholy, and the piano opening is haunting. It’s from Ronstadt’s 1976 album, “Hasten Down the Wind.”

You can hear Bonoff’s version here, and it’s nearly as good, though her voice is more delicate. Ronstadt’s voice was one of the most powerful in the history of rock, and it’s sad that she left the music scene so early.

48 thoughts on “Someone to Lay Down Beside Me”

  1. I’ve always loved this song but I’ve always wished somebody would reissue it with correct grammar — should be “Someone to LIE Down Beside Me.” I can’t sing to the track without correcting it myself.

    1. Same with Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady lay”.
      Of course, both of them knew the grammar was wrong. It just sounded better, and that’s tht main reason why certain words are chosen – they just sound good.
      A good example is “American Pie”. A meaningless jumble of words that sound good.

      1. You’re right! I’d forgotten about Dylan, but I really think they didn’t know it was wrong. They thought it sounded better that way because so many people say it that way. And they say it that way because stars like Ronstadt and Dylan sing it that way. So it must be correct, right? Neverending cycle.

        2. I don’t know about Linda Ronstadt, but Bob Dylan definitely knew it was wrong. But “Lie Lady Lie” sounded even wronger if you see what I mean.

    2. Sometimes bad grammar in songs confuses me. I listen to a lot of Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, for example. Their lyrics are full of double negatives. I usually don’t care about grammar if I can make sense of their meaning but it is always distracting.

      1. Tom Waits is the king of surreal lyrics and melodies. I’ve never been to big on Mr. Cohen though…I think it’s his voice that doesn’t really do the trick for me.

          1. I seem to recall a song with a lyric that went something like “I ain’t never done nothing to nobody no-how.” That would be a quintuple-negative!

  2. Thank you for sharing the live version, so much more passion in her voice. Lots of sexy reverbs and distortion.

  3. Completely agree with your comments about Ronstadt’s voice and departure from rock. I also love her version of Blue Bayou and Hurt So Bad.

  4. I have always loved her voice. She is one of those artists that I like to listen to with eyes closed sitting in a perfectly placed chair in front of a pair of high quality, very accurate stereo loud speakers. Of course, the recording has to be good quality.

    Her voice is effortlessly powerful and piercing, but not in an annoying way. Brings a tear to my eye.

    Did she disappear from the music scene early? I seem to remember that she left mainstream pop / rock fairly early, but continued in other genres, often in Spanish.

    1. I have always loved her voice. She is one of those artists that I like to listen to with eyes closed sitting in a perfectly placed chair in front of a pair of high quality, very accurate stereo loud speakers. Of course, the recording has to be good quality.

      Not a fan of vinyl, I take it then? 🙂

      1. Well, I like vinyl, probably just because that is what I grew up with. I still have all of my vinyl records.

        But, though some claim that vinyl can sound better than digital formats it is much more expensive equipment wise and limited as far as the variety and quantity of very good recordings available compared to CDs. Maybe with a very expensive turntable and stylus, and a top quality vinyl record you can achieve a slightly better sound, to some people anyway. But you can achieve very good sound indeed with the right $200 or less CD player and readily available good quality digital recording, as in 95 out of a hundred people couldn’t tell any difference, including me probably.

        With either source amps and speakers need to be quality components as well, of course. That is one thing I love about digital formats. The money you spent on turntables and styluses in the pre-digital era can now be invested in your other equipment because a good CD player is relatively cheap. You can spend lots of money on a CD player if you want to for some reason. But you can buy one for 25%, or less, of the high end audiophile CD player du jour that is so close in the quality of the sound that even most experts can’t tell the difference.

        1. I have completely stopped buying cd’s and are now downloading ( legally of course ) all my music.

          I really do miss the experience of listening to a complete album from start to finish.

          I think it’s time to invest in a new cd player and get my cd-collection back on it’s feet.

          Thank you for the inspiration, darrelle. 🙂

          1. 🙂

            Don’t get too crazy on amp and speakers. It’s real easy to talk yourself into spending more than you should on that stuff.

          2. Hehe, I’m a gear freak so I’ll probably end up buying something grossly overpriced because I’m convinced that I can hear the difference no matter how miniscule it may be.

            That’s how it usually ends. 🙂

          3. Me too. In some instances there is a tangible difference though.

            One example, most speakers, even many high end ones, are intentionally “bright.” They sound great . . . for a few minutes, until your ears are pounded flat. Then they sound just that, flat. Better to go for accuracy of reproduction of the recording, that way the speakers sound good all the time. Unless the recording is crappy of course.

            That is one down side to a good sound system. It will really hilight bad recordings. After I put together my first quality sound system I couldn’t stand listening to half my collection anymore because they sounded so bad. Though much older music has been remastered, there is still a lot of music that I like that either just hasn’t been remastered, or the source recordings are just so poor that nothing can be done to significantly improve them.

          4. I really do miss the experience of listening to a complete album from start to finish.

            Maybe I’m missing something, but why would you need a CD player for that? My phone handles MP3 albums and playlists just fine. (My car, not so much, but don’t get me started.)

          5. Well, I guess it really is a first-world problem, but I have a tendency to skip through songs on a whim. The problem is that I have my entire music library at disposal and can change the tune with the click of a button.

            When it’s on a cd player, I’m too lazy to get up and change the cd when the catchy tunes get too familiar, thus resulting in a deeper and longer listening experience.

            I guess what I’m trying to say is that me being lazy makes me a more patient listener. 🙂

    2. She also branched out into light opera in the early 80s – singing the role of Mabel in the film version of Pirates of Penzance (also some stage performances I believe).

      Pretty good I thought. (Kevin Kline gave an entertainingly flamboyant performance as the Pirate King.)

      1. Yes, Kline and Ronstadt are good in that movie, as is Angela Lansbury as Ruth.

        However I found the female chorus grating with their deliberately nasal, Ethel Merman singing style. I observed the same thing last month in a stage production of Pirates. What’s up with that?

    3. She recorded quite a few albums in the 80’s and 90’s, and even as late as 2005 (?) a disc with a Cajun group.

      Canciones de mi padre is a very good album, a good intro to ranchera or frontera music.

  6. Wow. [You’ve done it now]. Linda is officially my favourite singer of all time.

    Ironically, she was probably the first popular singer I heard, with ‘Different Drum’ (with the Stone Ponies), and then I lost sight of her completely (metaphorically speaking) for decades until about a year ago when I started catching up on old songs on Youtube and Linda just blew me away. Long Long Time (whether on the Midnight Special or the Johnny Cash Show) – such a powerful voice from such a slight-looking girl (and as someone remarked, she was a real hottie in those days).

    She’s always favoured songs with interesting and slightly unusual tunes and lyrics.

    I just have to rattle off a few of my favourites – Across the Border (with Emmylou Harris and a great harmonica accompaniment by Neil Young); Feels Like Home; Talk to me of Mendocino; Down So Low (from the same Rockpalast performance as you linked to?); and I think the one that shows off her amazing voice best, Adios (the first time I heard it, I had tears in my eyes, and there are only a couple of pieces of music that have done that to me). (And who but Jimmy Webb and Linda would have the nerve to use ‘grandiose’ and ‘morose’ in a popular song and make it work?)

      1. I note the irony, in the present context, that it was posted by an Emmylou fan who has decorated the video exclusively with pics of Emmylou. (I assume that was Emmylou with the dark hair, I only know her with silver hair…)

        (Not knocking Emmylou, I like her very much in her collaboration with Mark Knopfler on All the Roadrunning).

        It’s a great recording, though I do (very slightly because the one you linked is so good it’s hard to improve on very much) prefer the studio version at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfCS1yXg8gk

        Oh, and yes I had to listen to both versions right through to compare. That really took dedication 😉

        1. Thanks for that. It’s a great tune so I thoroughly enjoyed listening to a couple of times in a row. 🙂

    2. And, from way out in left field, in “Cabron,” the Red Hot Chili Peppers rhyme “barbecue” and “boogaloo.” Color me weird, but I like that combination.

  7. I like the song, but I find I prefer Bonoff’s version. I agree that she’s vastly underrated.

  8. Ronstadt’s voice just knocks me out. Seeing her live could be spine chilling. She got off the celebrity treadmill by choice but continued to explore music that was near to her heart. Her memoir, already receiving warm reviews, is to be published September 17th.

  9. I still have the LPs of Karla Bonoff’s first two albums from the 70s, and I had the great good fortune to hear and see her live as the opening act on Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” college tour in 1979. Bonoff was one of the best of the folkie-pop singer-songwriters in the 1970s Southern California music scene. I believe that she, Linda Ronstadt, Kenny Edwards, and Andrew Gold briefly performed as a 4-person group called Brindle.

  10. When I was teaching the core music course, one of the selections in the textbook was Karla Bonoff’s “Isn’t It Always Love?” [which of course you can find on youtube.] Good song, good songwriter and performer.

  11. Check out Trio and Trio II, 2 albums she did with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris.

    1. One of the High Sierra Trio’s more intriguing tracks is Neil Young’s ‘After the Gold Rush’ – you can see it live here –
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CoM9rMQuXE
      – the weird instrument making the unearthly sound in the background is a glass harmonica, an instrument Linda took an interest in (she has produced a recording of glass music played by Dennis James).

  12. Linda Ronstadt has a wonderful voice, but surely Karla Bonoff’s version is musically much better – the balance and interplay between voice and instrument is far more subtle.

  14. One of my favourites too. It seems a curiously old-fashioned song (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) – I had it down for the 20’s or 30’s, mostly based on the lines “And it’s on to South Bend Indiana, flat out across the western plains. Rise up over the Rockies and down into California” which suggested to me she’s travelling by train. Okay, I know about Amtrak, but it still surprised me to find it was written in 1975. I’d kind of assumed that the default for any transcontinental trip since the war was by plane. I don’t know if anyone can throw more light on the reference.

    1. Oh drat, that was meant to be a reply to krzysztof1, about ‘Mendocino’, of course.

  15. In a recent interview on NPR Linda Ronstadt revealed that she left the music scene because she has Parkinson’s disease — which affects the vocal cords profoundly — and could no longer sing. In her last album she had a much flatter voice as a result and had to compensate by her hard won skills. She comes from a very old Tucson Hispanic family, They were here long before Anglos arrived. Her talents were so much more than just Rock. She starred in a brilliant production of “The Pirates of Pensance” on Broadway.

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