What's New (Linda Ronstadt album)

Infobox Album |
Name = What's New
Type = studio
Artist = Linda Ronstadt


Released = September, 1983
Recorded =
Genre = Jazz, Traditional Pop
Length = 36:07
Label = Elektra
Producer = Peter Asher
Engineer =
Reviews =
*Allmusic Rating|2.5|5 [http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:09fixqt5ldfe link]
*Time Magazine Rating|4.5|5 [http://www.ronstadt-linda.com/arttm83.htm link] |
Last album = "Get Closer"
(1982)
This album = "What's New"
(1983)
Next album = "Lush Life"
(1984)

"What's New" is a 1983 Linda Ronstadt album consisting of nine songs of Traditional Pop music. It represents the first in a trilogy of 1980s albums Ronstadt recorded with Nelson Riddle.

The album spawned a major change in popular culture because Ronstadt was then considered the leading female vocalist of the rock n roll era cite web | title=Rolling Stone | work=Rock's Venus| url=http://www.ronstadt-linda.com/rolling78.htm| accessdate=May 4 | accessyear=2007] cite web | title=The Daily News | work=Work's out fine,best female voice in rock and roll| url=http://www.ronstadt-linda.com/c821114.htm | accessdate=May 4 | accessyear=2007] cite web | title=Time | work=TheLinda Ronstadt Interview | url=http://www.ronstadt-linda.com/arttm83.htm | accessdate=April 9 | accessyear=2007] and for her to do this was then considered unorthodox. Both her record company and manager, Peter Asher, were very reluctant in producing this album with Ronstadt, but eventually her determination won them out and the albums exposed a whole new generation to the sounds of the pre-swing and swing eras. cite web | title=Jerry Jazz Musician | work=The Peter Levinson Interview| url=http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/mainHTML.cfm?page=levinson.html | accessdate=May 4 | accessyear=2007] It should be noted that in 1983, "Traditional Pop" music was pushed aside and the onetime popular music sung by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett and their contemporaries was relegated in the 1960s and 1970s to Las Vegas club acts and elevator music. Ronstadt recently remarked that she did her part in rescuing these songs in which she calls "little jewels of artistic expression" from "spending the rest of their lives riding up and down on the elevators."cite web | title=NPR | work=Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!, April 28, 2007 · Music legend Linda Ronstadt plays a game called "They Said We Were Mad at the Academy! Mad I Tell You!" Three questions about strange, but real, patents in recent years| url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9888452 | accessmonthday=May 28 | accessyear=2007]

Since, artist using the Ronstadt prototype, rock/pop stars singing Traditional Pop music for a large commercial market, has become acceptable and bankable.

"What's New" was released in the Fall of 1983, it spent 82 weeks on the Billboard album charts and climbed to the No. 3 position It is RIAA certified triple platinum (over 3 million copies sold), as of 2001. The album earned Ronstadt a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female

As Stephen Holden of the "New York Times" noted the significance of the album to popular culture when he wrote that "What's New" "isn't the first album by a rock singer to pay tribute to the golden age of the pop, but is ... the best and most serious attempt to rehabilitate an idea of pop that Beatlemania and the mass marketing of rock LP's for teen-agers undid in the mid-60's. In the decade prior to Beatlemania, most of the great band singers and crooners of the 40's and 50's codified a half-century of American pop standards on dozens of albums, many of them now long out-of-print."cite web | title=The New York Times| work=LINDA RONSTADT CELEBRATES THE GOLDEN AGE OF POP, By Stephen Holden Published: September 4, 1983|url=http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?res=9D06E3DC1538F937A3575AC0A965948260| accessdate=May 10 | accessyear=2007]

Track listing

# "What's New?" (Johnny Burke, Bob Haggart)
# "I've Got a Crush on You" (George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin)
# "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry" (Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne)
# "Crazy He Calls Me" (Carl Sigman, Sidney Keith Russell)
# "Someone to Watch Over Me" (George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin)
# "I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" (Bing Crosby, Ned Washington, Victor Young)
# "What'll I Do" (Irving Berlin)
# "Lover Man (Oh Where Can You Be?)" (Jimmy Davis, Jimmy Sherman, Roger "Ram" Ramirez)
# "Good-bye" (Gordon Jenkins)

References