I'll take a straightforward documentary like this one over a fictionalized, cookie cutter musical biopic any day of the week. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman don't take a whole lot of chances here, nor are there any real flourishes put on the narrative to indicate much in the way of laying hands on the story. Which is fine, since no one needs to do that with someone like Linda Ronstadt.

The music, the music, the music. With someone like Linda Ronstadt, a singing virtuoso with a taste for doing whatever she feels like at the time, that's what's parking your ass in the seat. And this delivers. A dutiful timeline from the Stone Poneys era to the early pop chart…

the sound of Linda Ronstadt's voice is precisely the sound of the music my father loves, the sound of the music i resisted for so long because i was childishly bent on turning down anything he tried to share with me for this stubborn reason and that stubborn reason, the sound of the music now i find so full and alive and out-of-this-body and hurling toward a life with no rough edges—a life fully realized, moving forward in a song

i went into this knowing very little about Linda's life, and i left reckoning with the force with which she has lived it. this documentary feels more like a love letter to Linda than to her fans, making up in…

Linda Ronstadt is a national treasure and this documentary does a great job of showing you why. It takes you through her long, multi-genred career using archival interviews (and current-day interviews with industry friends) to seemlessly guide the proceedings. I am familiar with the many stages of her career and I listen to her albums endlessly but it’s astounding to watch her (or hear her) go from folk ingenue to rock star to operetta leading lady to standards singer to canciones classicist all in the span of 100 minutes or so. The film is bookended with some present-day footage, including a rare and revelatory sing-a-long with her family. Her outlook on life (including her Parkinson’s diagnosis) and her career is…

I didn’t know too much about Linda Rondstadt going into this- I knew some of her music and I knew she was one of The Stone Poneys and I remember her being on the Muppet Show. When I told my mom that I was going to see this she started telling me all these details about her and I was like MOM YOU’RE RUINING THE MOVIE! Apparently my grandmother really liked her song Blue Bayou (because my grandmother was a hip lady). I saw this at Cine in Athens with a crowd of surprisingly rowdy Boomers who kept talking to the movie, which definitely added to my enjoyment. There are a bunch of interviews with old rock dudes that look…

Linda is so underrated today it makes me so sad! She was literally the queen of rock & roll, breaking records left and right, paving the way for women in popular music but most people not from her generation wouldn’t know it! Absolutely no one has a voice or range like hers. She’s done it all: folk, country, pop, rock, opera, mariachi, the great American standards, etc. After (literally) non-stop success in rock, she got bored and did two albums full of standards previously sung by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. Everyone told her not to, but she did it anyway and was successful. After that she went back to her roots of traditional Mexican music and recorded…

☆"People would think that I was trying to reinvent myself, but I never invented myself to start with. I just kinda popped out into the world."☆

Documentarians have figured out the secret sauce to making a buck and earning critical praise in the last few years: make it Boomer. The most Boomer of all of the 2019 non-fiction Boomer films is almost certainly Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, a sweet and harmless but relentlessly standard and linear story of the eponymous singer and her musical career. It's fine. Your oldest aunt would love it.

Breaking all the rules of popular music, the Arizona-born entertainer broke into the folk scene in the late 60s but quickly became known for…

Linda Ronstadt is one of those performers who always seems like she’s lip-syncing because there’s no way a voice can sound that perfect in a live setting on the fly in a TV studio or venue. Raw, sure. Powerful, no problem. But perfect, just round and clear and hitting every single note in an effortless fashion? It shouldn’t be allowed. 

This was a conventional doc but the footage of Linda singing is consistently astonishing because she is so varied in what she sings and how she sings it yet invariably spectacular. She’s also probably the best example of someone who seems totally normal despite having been one of the biggest stars in the country. 

I hope this doc turns some…