How Parkinson’s Disease Changed the Life of Linda Ronstadt

Every singer’s dream is to perform until the last breath of their life. Being able to perform on stage gives these artists unexplained happiness. It’s like they were born to sing and to give joy to other people. Once singing is taken away from a singer’s life, their world seems to fall apart. Anyway, the country icon Linda Ronstadt was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and this had a great impact on her life as an artist.

Since her diagnosis, Linda Ronstadt slowly withdrew herself from the public. Plus, she stopped releasing new hits and she even canceled some of her tours. She said in an interview:

“I’d start to sing and then it would just clamp up. It was, like, a cramp, my voice would freeze. And I said, ‘There’s something wrong with my voice.’ And people would say, ‘Oh, you’re just a perfectionist.’ I go, ‘No, there’s really something systemically wrong.’ And it’s very slow-moving, this disease, so it took a long time to really finally manifest.”

Linda Ronstadt and her Struggle

The 72-year-old singer was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the early 2000s. But the manifestation was not that severe. She still managed to release hits until 2009 and she only revealed her disease in 2013. A lot of her fans were saddened with this shocking revelation because they will not be able to hear her perform again.

She also explained why she withdrew herself from performing:

“I was just yelling. Instead of singing, I was just kind of yelling. I didn’t want to charge people for that … I could hear it. It wasn’t any fun anymore. You know, singing is … there are really a lot of things you can do with your voice; you can slide on all different sorts of textures and things. And if you’re not doing that, it’s not interesting.”

Her Last Hurrah

Now, Linda Ronstadt is a couch potato and she spends most of her time reading books. But, there are still flash moments wherein she wanted to sing again. Ronstadt is a singer and will forever be a singer in spite of what happened. For now, let’s just hope that everything will be better for her.