Jim Farber

The decision to document the specific struggles, hopes and pleasures Ronstadt expressed throughout her more than 40-year career has special significance given her experience with Parkinson’s disease, which robbed her of the ability to sing nearly a decade ago. In the time since, various documentarians have approached about preserving her legacy on film. She rebuffed them all before relenting to the Academy Award-winning directorial team of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.

“They wrote a letter that was so literate,” Ronstadt said during a phone interview from her home in the Bay Area. “And I had seen the documentary they made about Harvey Milk and thought it was very respectful,” she added, referring to “The Times of Harvey Milk,” from 1984. “So, I thought, if somebody’s going to do it, it might as well be them.”

The ambivalence embedded in that last remark has everything to do with how 73-year-old Ronstadt views her life now. “I see myself as retired,” she said. “It’s weird having a current project — especially one that I didn’t control.”

And control is important for Ronstadt. It’s what allowed her to break as many rules of pop stardom as she did, when she did. At the same time, she’s self-deprecating about her achievements. In an hourlong conversation, she breezily dismissed her abilities at vocal phrasing, critiqued her multimillion-selling versions of American standards and made sure to mention singers she believes sang the Mexican songs she loved as a child with far more skill than she did.

Ronstadt even seemed nonplussed about the Kennedy Center Honor she will receive in Washington in December. “That’s weird, too,” she said, adding that she will show up to accept it, in part, because she was told Trump wouldn’t attend. “I don’t think anybody would show up” if he was going, she said. (The president has not yet announced whether he will go this year.)

Though Ronstadt admits that, some days, her health makes it hard for her to articulate clearly, the day we spoke she sounded robust. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: In the past, you have spoken about the great influence of your father’s singing. The film lets us finally hear him. He performed locally, but did he ever record professionally?

A: No. I tried to record him once but he got red light fever. His voice sounds like a cross between Pedro Infante and Frank Sinatra. Most of the songs I learned in Spanish as a kid. I had never heard the records. I just heard my dad sing them.

Q: Your Mexican background was an issue for you at school. In the film, you say that children would be scolded for speaking Spanish.

A: My best friend Patty’s sister had darker skin, and she was forbidden from going into the public swimming pool. We were outraged. Arizona was pretty racist. I think it’s gotten worse.

Q: From Arizona, you went to Los Angeles, where you had your first hit in 1967 with “Different Drum.” That’s a stereotype-breaking song for a woman to sing: The character is a rambler who can’t be tamed. Were you that person back then?

A: That’s me! I thought I was too young for marriage or anything resembling it. And I continued to feel that way until I had children of my own. Having children makes you grow up.

Q: But you adopted those children on your own. And you’ve chosen never to marry.

A: Right. I didn’t need somebody else’s opinion about how to raise my children. It’s hard enough being with my own opinion.

Q: An interesting pattern developed early in your career: You met a lot of talented women, like Emmylou Harris and Karla Bonoff, but instead of feeling competitive, you collaborated with them.

A: I’ve never seen music as a competition. It’s a conspiracy. The word “conspiros,” from the Greek, means to breathe together. José Abreu, who was so successful at teaching children how to play music in Venezuela, said, music is a conspiracy to commit beauty. If I sing with Emmy, I’m trying to ride right on her, to follow her shape exactly by singing harmony. We lean in and breathe the same air and tell our truth.

Q: The specific scene you rose from in LA was dominated by singer-songwriters. But you only sang. Did you feel self-conscious about that?

A: The world was full of so many good writers, and I liked the idea that I could interpret somebody else’s song. If a song told my story, I wanted to sing it.

Q: Jackson Browne called you an auteur of those songs because you made them your own.

A: It was probably my inept phrasing. It wasn’t until 1980 that I had a clue about phrasing. And I’m still pretty clueless about it. Bonnie Raitt can sing like nothing is going to bother her. I can’t sound like that.

Q: Many people in the film talk about how critical you are of your recorded performances. What’s up with that?

A: It’s funny to hear recorded music because it’s frozen in time. And I experience those songs as something fluid. I did all those early recordings live. There was no overdubbing. And we picked the track that was best for the band, not for my voice necessarily. Then I’d get onstage, and that’s when I’d get really comfortable with it. The ones I recorded all sound rigid to me. I’d think, “I sang that better in Cleveland on February the 6th!”

Q: The rock ’n’ roll world that you came from fostered attitudes about sexual conduct that have come under new scrutiny in the wake of #MeToo. Did you experience sexual harassment back then?

A: [Bursts out laughing] I felt sexually harassed a lot of times. There was a guy on “The Johnny Cash Show” that came into my hotel room and took his clothes off. I scooted away and sat in the lobby until he left. He said, “If you play nice with me, I’ll make sure you get more TV shows from this.” But I hated performing on television! So, he had nothing to offer me! If I had been in a position where I was beholden to him, it would have been a different story.

Q: At the height of your career, in the 1970s, you were seen as a sex symbol. Did you feel pressure to live up to that image?

A: I couldn’t! [Laughs] I’m a casual dresser, to say the least. It’s hard for me to go beyond Levi’s and a baggy sweater. I always look like I’m going to clean somebody’s house.

Q: But there was that famous 1976 Rolling Stone cover where you’re in red lingerie with one strap undone. In Joe Hagan’s book about the magazine’s founder, Jann Wenner, he reports that Wenner told photographer Annie Leibovitzto make you look like “a Tijuanawhore.”

A: She had an agenda. I was naïve. I said, “I don’t wear red underwear.” She said, “I’ll let you see the pictures before we put them out.” Sure enough, she brought the pictures over to [Ronstadt’s producer and manager] Peter Asher’s house, and we said, “No, you can’t use that.” She said, “Well, I just said I’d let you see them. I didn’t say I’d let you choose them.” That was really upsetting.

[In an email response, Leibovitz called Ronstadt “anything but naïve,” adding that Wenner gave her no direction for the shoot. Leibovitz wrote that Asher was the one who didn’t want the pictures to run, but that, privately, Ronstadt “told me to run them.”]

Q: At your commercial peak, you were called “the queen of rock ’n’ roll.” But you weren’t really a rock singer, right?

A: Never! I’ve always thought of myself as a ballad singer. I couldn’t do anything nuanced or delicate [in rock ’n’ roll].

Q: You started to perform standards in 1983, well before that became a bankable trend. How much resistance did you face at first?

A: Oh my God! The president of my record company came over to my house and said, “You’re going to destroy your career.” I couldn’t even hear him. I wanted to sing those songs so bad, I think I would have died if I didn’t. But I didn’t do them all that well. I never sang with an orchestra before. I could have done much better if I’d had it on the road first.

Q: It’s even more amazing that you sold millions by recording traditional Mexican songs. Yet when critics talk about the pop artists who brought music from outside the U.S. or U.K. to the pop mainstream, they mention Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel, not you. Is that frustrating?

A: Who cares? My music is not curing cancer. It will be gone soon enough. There are better interpreters I can recommend, like Lola Beltrán, Lydia Mendoza and Chavela Vargas.

Q: Before you released the Mexican songs, a lot of people didn’t know your background. Were they not paying attention?

A: I only said it in every interview. In 1968, I said I’m of Mexican-German heritage. But I had white skin and a German name so I wasn’t Mexican. It was part of the way Mexicans are treated in this culture. We’re invisible.

Q: Obviously, singing was your passion since childhood. Where does that passion live now?

A: I listen to music really passionately. I can really hear music in greater detail. I listen to opera on YouTube, where you get bad picture and sound. But I can see Anna Netrebko sing “La Traviata” and then see Maria Callas sing it and then someone else.

Q: There’s a coup in the film where we get to hear you sing a bit with members of your family.

A: There’s no way I could have them sing and not have me sing harmony. It was what my family did. It’s always important to add to a song whatever you can.

This article originally appeared in

Linda Ronstadt, Retired From Singing, Is Still a Glorious Voice

At the start of the new documentary “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice,” the 10-time Grammy winner talks about why people sing. “For the same reasons birds do,” she says. “For a mate, to claim their territory or simply to give voice to being alive in the midst of a beautiful day. They sing so that coming generations won’t forget what the current generation endured, or dreamed, or delighted in.”

“I was trying to produce through someone else’s eyes and ears — someone who’s not here,” he said with vexed intensity, while sitting at his control board.

“It was really hard not to criticize yourself the whole time. Would he like this? What would he have done?”

The “he” Falk referred to — Tim Bergling, aka Avicii, the genre-redefining dance-pop songwriter and producer of global hits like “Levels” and “Wake Me Up” — died last April 20 at age 28 during a vacation in Muscat, Oman. A statement from his family at the time stated, “He could not go on,” and while they still decline to go into the details of his death, they are publicly acknowledging the death was a suicide.

The family, still very much grieving, is also breaking its nearly yearlong silence with two announcements: the arrival of newly completed Avicii music and the formation of a charitable organization called the Tim Bergling Foundation that will support groups involved with mental health and suicide prevention. A full album, titled simply “Tim,” is due out in June, and its first track, “S.O.S.,” arrives Wednesday.

“Tim,” which counts Falk among its core production and writing team, is not a posthumous collection of musical leftovers. Instead, it concentrates on songs the artist was far into writing and producing during the last three months of his life, songs which, his friends say, he very much wanted released. Together, the sounds and sentiments they offer represent a cohesive and striking leap ahead for a musician already known as one of the most impactful innovators in electronic pop of the last decade.

“This was a different Tim,” Falk said. “A Tim that wanted to say something.”

To illuminate the origins of Avicii’s final songs, and to speak more candidly about his suicide, his father sat for his first formal interview since his son’s death. Avicii’s oldest friends spoke, too, as did his most trusted songwriting and production partners in the studios where they have just completed work on the project. All 12 who spoke were in agreement about one thing above all: Not only did they not see Avicii’s death coming, they insisted that in the months before it happened, he was in the best spirits they had seen him in for well over a year.

“He had so many plans,” said Lucas Von Bahder, a close friend since middle school. “There were things he wanted to do, places he was going to go.”

Albin Nedler, a collaborator who was staying in Avicii’s Los Angeles home when he left on his trip, recalled his saying he was “in a really good place.” Another creative partner, Vincent Pontare, communicated with Avicii when he was on the plane to Oman. “He was super excited,” he said. “We talked about doing the album after this.”

Their testimony stands in dramatic contrast to the image of the star presented by the documentary “Avicii: True Stories,” which debuted on Netflix in Sweden directly after his death and in the United States in December. The film, which friends say had the musician’s enthusiastic approval, portrayed an artist who seemed to be having a slow-motion nervous breakdown brought on by the relentless pressures of success and a brutal touring schedule. “My life is all about stress,” he says at one point in the film. “It will kill me.”

The movie also chronicled Avicii’s struggles with alcohol, which led to an 11-day hospital stay in New York in 2012 for pancreatitis; in 2014, his gallbladder and appendix were removed. Afterward, doctors gave him pills for his pain, which he later said were grossly overprescribed. With an unflinching honesty that his friends considered one of his finest traits, Avicii spoke in the film about his social anxiety, lifelong shyness and profound discomfort with fame. “He worked way too much and looked too thin,” Pontare said about that period. “I said to myself, ‘What happened with him?’”

Though the fast-rising star was at the peak of his career then, playing before hundreds of thousands of fans at gigs commanding $250,000 a night, the pressure, and milieu, of the hard-partying world of electronic dance music encouraged his most destructive habits. “It’s very easy to become too attached to partying,” he told Rolling Stone of that period. “You become lonely and get anxieties. It becomes toxic.”

Worse, Von Bahder said, “the more famous he got, the more amplified his social anxiety got.”

By the end of 2016, Avicii made a bold choice. He quit his highly lucrative touring career to concentrate solely on his greatest love: making music in the studio. Friends and associates say he quickly began to heal. In his adopted home of Los Angeles, he hired a personal trainer, started to meditate and began a writing renaissance. “He was looking super good,” noted Pontare. “We said, ‘the fire is back in him.’”

At the same time, the lyrics he was writing in this fertile period had a dark side. They referred repeatedly to “fading away,” being “low down” and “broken.” They also angrily dismissed “the party life” — ironically, the very scene for which Avicii created one of recent pop’s most rousing soundtracks. For the new single, “S.O.S.,” he wrote lines that Aloe Blacc, the vocalist on “Wake Me Up,” sings with special urgency: “Can you hear me, S.O.S./help me put my mind to rest.”

None of the people who heard those lyrics at the time found special meaning in them. To confuse matters, darkness had been an element in Avicii’s music from the opening song on his debut album, “True.” “Wake Me Up,” a No. 1 smash in nine countries and a Top 5 hit in the United States, finds its narrator experiencing the precise inverse of the redemptive refrain from “Amazing Grace” — believing he’s found, only to discover that he is, in fact, lost.

“Tim always mixed the dark and the light,” said Per Sundin, an executive at Universal Music, Nordic, who signed a deal with Avicii when the musician was still recording under the name Tim Berg. Hearing the new lyrics now, however, “You go, ‘Oh, is this a metaphor?’ You can interpret the songs in different ways.”

Avicii’s earliest songs invited little such interpretation. As a teenager, he began his career by making simple beats on his own. But he developed quickly as a songwriter and, by 2010, created the fully melodic pop/dance gem “Seek Bromance,” a Top 15 hit in Britain. Things really ignited, however, after he took what some felt was a Dylan-goes-electric-style risk at the key electronic music festival Ultra in 2013, where he debuted “Wake Me Up,” which injected elements of folk and country into electronic dance music, aided by live musicians.

“First, it was shock, then people started booing,” said Johnny Tennander, Avicii’s publisher at Sony/ATV. The young crowd was more taken aback when Avicii brought out a co-songwriter, Mac Davis, who had written hits for Elvis Presley. “On the internet, the comments were ‘rest in peace, Avicii’s career,’” Sundin of Universal Music said.

Later, the company tried to recover, and seed interest, by issuing a pre-release SoundCloud mix of the album, one bold enough to also include a song like “Hey Brother,” sung by bluegrass star Dan Tyminski, and another penned by avant-gardist Antony Hegarty (now Anohni). At that point, “People said, ‘hold up, this is something new,’” Tennander recalled. “He’s writing music history.”

“True” hit No. 5 on the Billboard 200; its 2015 follow-up, “Stories,” reached No. 17. “Tim,” which will be Avicii’s third album, advances his legacy of exploration by embracing psychedelia, Arabian music, sounds of the Caribbean and more. The lyrics, too, show significant growth. “The album felt coherent and personal,” Tennander said.

While the new music presents many new angles, the executives overseeing it insisted that they eschew the more commercial route of recruiting superstar guest stars to, instead, use only longtime Avicii collaborators, including Kristoffer Fogelmark and Nedler, Salem Al Fakir and Pontare. Even the top name involved, Chris Martin of Coldplay — who sang a new song that leaked last year, “Heaven” — had sung and helped write a 2015 Avicii track, “True Believer.” The second mandate for the record was to keep as close to the demos the artist left as possible. One track planned for the album got pulled at the last minute because, Sundin said, “it had developed too far from Tim’s vision.”

The producers say most songs were 75 to 80 percent done by the time of Avicii’s death. To fill in the rest, they relied on detailed notes he left on his phone and computer, some of which were written in his final days. It fell to Christopher Thordson, from the artist’s management team, to search all his devices for information. “He wrote very specific things about the music,” Thordson said.

Conversations about what, if anything, they’d do with that information, and with the music, began among the executives mere days after the star’s death. They received an encouraging response from Avicii’s father, Klas Bergling, who controls the estate. “It should be released,” he said in our interview. “No question about it.”

Bergling, 73, who ran a successful office supply business before retiring, and his wife, Anki Liden, a well-known actress in Sweden, live in the same apartment they moved to when their musical son was 7. (He stayed there with them, and his three siblings, until his late teens.) Dotting their tastefully designed home are pictures of their youngest son, mostly childhood scenes at the beach. In the kitchen there’s a handsome portrait of a serious-looking Avicii that was used at his memorial gathering; his mother has tempered the intensity of the photo by placing in front of it a snapshot of him smiling widely while playing music with Nile Rodgers. Standing in the kitchen, his mother indicated the shirt, pants and watch she was wearing. “Tim, Tim, Tim,” she said, pointing to each in succession. “They were his. He’s with me.”

In the living room, Bergling sat under a giant painting of Stockholm created by his father, who had designed sets for the city’s opera, including one production directed by Ingmar Bergman. He spoke slowly and intently, staring down at the floor for long periods, meeting a reporter’s eye only when he finished speaking. He described his son as very shy growing up, a deep thinker who felt comfortable socially only with his closest friends. They spent countless hours in this apartment playing video games and watching the “The Lord of the Rings” film series and “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.” Music came to him later, as a midteen, after his blues-loving, guitar-playing father gave him a guitar of his own. “Tim advanced quickly from my quality,” Bergling said with a smile.

His skill at computer games fed into a passion for creating sounds on music programs. After a few years of honing his style, he adopted the stage name Avicii, from a Buddhist term for a of realm of hell. “It sounded tough,” Bergling said. “That’s super for a teenager.”

As his son’s career progressed, and then exploded, Bergling noticed in Avicii an increasing stage fright, though he loved that his music was being received so resoundingly. Bergling feels the documentary portrait of his son as troubled captured much of the truth from that period, but he believes the timing of the film’s release, just after Avicii’s death, left people unaware of the happier, final phase of his life, after he got off the road.

Which leads to a difficult question: Why, 16 months into a brighter phase of his life, did Avicii end it? Bergling said flatly that he does not know. “There is no letter,” he said. He likened his son’s death to “an accident on the motor road” with “several cars.” “Nothing points in the direction that he was planning it.”

He would not talk about the method of his son’s death. “It’s not even a year since it happened,” he said. “The family is very traumatized. We want peace.”

To help achieve it, he and his wife take “Tim timeouts” from dwelling on their grief. “It sounds a bit military, but you have to be military to handle this,” he said. “We are very vulnerable.” He said it helps, as well, to speak the word “suicide,” something he could not do before. “I use the word as often as I remember to use it,” he said. “I have to get used to the word.”

The next day, three of Avicii’s closest friends gathered to offer their own memories. They visited the middle school where they all met, pointing out where they used to sneak cigarettes and alcohol. They talked, too, about the computer games that obsessed them. “We were nerds,” Von Bahder said. “We went into music to interest girls. It didn’t work.”

Strolling the neighborhood, the friends advanced to Ciao Ciao Grande, a favorite spot for pizzas over the years.

Directly across the street from their table lies the musician’s final resting place. “He didn’t have far to go,” Von Bahder joked. It’s on the grounds of Hedvig Eleonora Church, where the name Tim Bergling appears on a plain plaque not much bigger than a playing card, one of 48 such demarcations on a grid hung on a wall. The star’s exact burial spot isn’t indicated, to stress modesty and to maintain privacy. “It’s very Tim,” Frederik Boberg, another friend, said.

The friends didn’t linger long. In that same vein, they have chosen not to speculate much on the motivations behind his death. And while they’ve heard the new lyrics, they’re loath to look too closely at them for clues.

Falk, on the other hand, remains haunted by them. “Now, when I listen, I hear a lonely person with a lot of big emotions that he didn’t have enough people to talk to about,” he said. “I feel this music was his way of getting some of that out. That makes this a really important record. Whatever Tim wanted to say is here.”

STOCKHOLM — For the past six months, music producer Carl Falk has been venturing into his dark and cloistered recording studio in central Stockholm to collaborate with a ghost.

A lost ghost, but still in the studio

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Jim Farber

Articles written by the author

Linda Ronstadt, Retired From Singing, Is Still a Glorious Voice

A lost ghost, but still in the studio

A lost ghost, but still in the studio