Robbed Hit of the Week 5/20/13 - Linda Ronstadt's "What's New"...

Linda Ronstadt - "What's New"
from the album What's New (1983)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #53

This week's "robbed hit" was a landmark recording for popular music where a highly respected member of the rock and roll community took a left turn to explore traditional vocal music, opening the doors for scores of singers to follow.

Linda Ronstadt was the biggest female rocker of the 70s, with a truckload of platinum and gold records and fourteen top-40 singles between 1970 and 1980. However, her 1982 album Get Closer, although grabbing a couple Grammys and scoring two top-40 singles with the title track and "I Knew You When", was far less successful than her previous work.

Before she released Get Closer, though, Linda had recorded and co-produced an album of vocal standards with producer Jerry Wexler (Aretha Franklin), though she never released the finished product. However two years later she tried again, this time with one of the biggest names in 40s orchestral music, Nelson Riddle. What came from those sessions was the What's New album, which her record company was very wary of releasing at all, fearing it would lose her her rock and roll fans. They couldn't have been more wrong.

What it did do is draw masses of kids (like myself) never really exposed to that music (save for maybe Frank Sinatra and Perry Como albums played by my parents) to listen solely based on its amazing craftsmanship and Ronstadt's flawless voice. The first single from the set was the title track, a 1939 standard written by Bob Haggart, a member of Bob Crosby's orchestra, as "I'm Free"...

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


In 1940, Johnny Burke wrote lyrics to the song, and retitled "What's New", was again recorded by Crosby and was a top-10 hit, as it was also for Benny Goodman and Hal Kemp's orchestras.

Bing Crosby also went to #7 with a cover of "What's New"...

As time went by, vocal greats like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra also recorded "What's New", but by far Linda Ronstadt's emotionally torn rendering of the song along with Riddle's perfect instrumentation made it an instant classic and definitive version...

"What's New" of course had a tough go at mainstream radio, which led it to peak on the pop chart at #53, though it was a big hit on the older-skewing Adult Contemporary chart, where it reached #5. The album was massive, staying at #3 for over a month and selling over three million copies. Of course now with this momentum Elektra was only pleased to have her record two more albums of standards, Lush Life and For Sentimental Reasons, that were just as high-quality as the first.

And of course this would lead rock and R&B singers like Natalie Cole and Rod Stewart to jump-start their somewhat faded careers with "oldies" albums, but for mere accomplishment, earnestness, and balls, Linda takes the cake.

I still get the shivers when I listen to the What's New album, and especially the closing notes of this thankfully revived classic.