QuoteProject
The essential elements of singing are voice, musicianship, and story. It is the rare artist that has all three in abundance.
Linda Ronstadt
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Successful singing combines vocal ability, musical skill, and storytelling. Few artists excel in all three areas.

In this quote, Linda Ronstadt emphasizes the critical components that contribute to effective singing: a strong voice, enhanced musicianship, and the ability to tell a compelling story through music. By highlighting that it is uncommon for an artist to possess a harmonious balance of these three elements, she suggests that true artistry in singing is a rare and valuable combination that deeply resonates with audiences.

Themes

SingingMusicianshipStorytellingArtistryVoice

In practice

Example use cases

A music teacher could use this quote to inspire students to develop their vocal skills, musicianship, and storytelling.

More from Linda Ronstadt

I don't record (any type of genre of music) that I didn't hear in my family's living room by the time I was 10. It just is my rule that I don't break because ... I can't do it authentically ... I really think that you're just hard-wiring (synapses) in your brain up until the age of maybe 12 or 10, and there are certain things you can't learn in an authentic way after that.
Linda RonstadtRead
I miss singing every day. I can't sing anymore. My voice doesn't work. I have Parkinson's disease, and it sometimes takes my words away from me.
Linda RonstadtRead
I first knew Laurie Lewis by her considerable reputation as a fiddle player and a writer of songs. When an opportunity came along to sing with her I seized it. Getting to know her as a singer and a person has been pure pleasure. Her voice is a rare combination of grit and grace, strength and delicacy. Her stories are always true.
Linda RonstadtRead
Songwriting wasn't my gift. I think you have to cultivate a gift; you have to practice and develop craft around your gift so that you can execute it in more convenient, efficient ways.
Linda RonstadtRead
Ninety-nine percent of singing is listening and hearing, and so then 1 percent of it is singing.
Linda RonstadtRead
Ninety-eight percent of the singing I did was private singing - it was in the shower, at the dishwasher, driving my car, singing with the radio, whatever. I can't do any of that now. I wish I could. I don't miss performing, particularly, but I miss singing.
Linda RonstadtRead

Similar quotes

As we lose our vagueness about ourself, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment. It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression .
Julia CameronRead
I think the only person a writer has an obligation to is himself. If what I write doesn't fulfill something in me, if I don't honestly feel it's the best I can do, then I'm miserable.
Truman CapoteRead
The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends.
Marshall McluhanRead
Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.
Nick HornbyRead
When you say 'design,' everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it's an emotive word. Everybody thinks it's how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything.
James DysonRead
So much of movie acting is in the lighting. And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort.
Ralph FiennesRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.