Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice may be the most well-wrought bio-pic/documentary of a contemporary musical figure in recent memory. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s film moves at a steady pace from the beginning to the end and, bereft of any melodrama whatsoever, it is a clear reflection of its down-to-earth subject. Notwithstanding the singer’s coquettish appearance in her younger years (flaunted to some degree, for instance, in the Boy Scout uniform tailored for the stage), Ronstadt is portrayed largely as she is today: dignified, independent and matter of fact, confident but self-deprecating and, much more often than not, very self-aware about the peaks and valleys of her career and her life as a whole.
The title carries additional resonance because Ronstadt does much of the narration herself throughout the duration of the film. Vintage archive photos and video weave in and out of interviews with notable figures who possess first hand experience with her the singer’s life and times: Don Henley drummed in her band on her first major tour (which is where he met future song-writing partner and co-founder of the Eagles, the late Glenn Frey), Davis Geffen headed his Asylum Records where she found her greatest success and John Boylan has insight as fascinating from his point of view as an early studio producer as does Jackson Browne from his perspective as her Seventies So-Cal peer.
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