On a bright 1978 album built for motion, Linda Ronstadt turned Eric Kaz’s Blowing Away into a still point where loss seems to lift off the ground.
When Linda Ronstadt recorded Blowing Away for Living in the USA, her 1978 Asylum album produced by Peter Asher, she was working at the height of her commercial reach but still choosing songs like a careful listener rather than a star protecting a formula. The album is often remembered for its confident surface: the famous roller-skating cover image, the bright pull of Back in the U.S.A., the tender pop glow of Ooh Baby Baby, and the way Ronstadt could move from Chuck Berry to Smokey Robinson to Elvis Costello without making the journey feel forced. Yet inside that wide-open pop-rock setting, Eric Kaz’s Blowing Away sits like a quieter room with the door half closed.
Eric Kaz was not a household name in the way some of the album’s other writers were, but he belonged to the circle of songwriters Ronstadt understood instinctively: writers who could make plain language carry complicated weather. Ronstadt had already found deep feeling in his work with Love Has No Pride, the Kaz and Libby Titus song she recorded earlier in the decade. By returning to a Kaz composition on Living in the USA, she was not repeating herself so much as continuing a conversation. His songs gave her the kind of emotional architecture she favored: direct enough to sing clearly, open enough to leave space around the wound.
That is where Ronstadt’s interpretation matters. Blowing Away is not a song that needs theatrical decoration. In her hands, it does not become a showcase for volume or bravura. She sings it with the control of someone who knows that a line can break without the voice breaking with it. Her gift as an interpreter was often mistaken for ease, because she made borrowed songs feel naturally inhabited. But what she does here is more precise than simply making the song pretty. She changes the emotional temperature. She lets the melody move as if it is trying to keep its balance, and she keeps the vocal centered even when the feeling inside the song seems to drift.
On an album that could flash with radio-ready color, Blowing Away brings a different kind of intensity. It does not compete with the more familiar covers around it; it deepens them. Living in the USA was released during a moment when Ronstadt had become one of the most visible voices in American popular music, and the record reached the top of the Billboard album chart. But the album’s strength is not only in its polish or popularity. It is in the way Ronstadt’s taste connects American songwriting across eras: early rock and roll, rhythm and blues, country feeling, new wave literate pop, and songwriter balladry all appear under the same roof. Blowing Away belongs to that last category, but Ronstadt refuses to treat it as fragile background. She gives it form, weight, and a strangely clear horizon.
There is a beautiful contradiction in hearing her sing a title like Blowing Away. Ronstadt’s voice was famous for its firmness, its clean attack, its ability to rise without strain. Yet the song asks for something less solid: surrender, distance, the sensation of something slipping beyond reach. A lesser performance might underline the sadness until it becomes heavy. Ronstadt does the opposite. She lets the sadness remain breathable. The result is a cover that feels less like possession than release. She does not pin the song down; she lets it pass through her.
That approach reveals why Ronstadt’s greatest covers endure. She did not treat interpretation as imitation, and she did not treat songwriting as raw material to conquer. She listened for the center of a song and then sang toward it. With Eric Kaz’s Blowing Away, that center is not dramatic collapse but emotional drift: the moment after certainty has disappeared, when a person is still standing but already feels changed by absence. Ronstadt’s reading understands that kind of feeling. It is measured, graceful, and quietly devastating precisely because it never begs for reaction.
Placed within Living in the USA, the song also complicates the album’s public image. The cover art suggests movement, youth, California brightness, and a certain late-seventies freedom. But the record itself keeps turning inward. Ronstadt could make a rock and roll song gleam, but she could also find the shadow inside a songwriter’s ballad and make it feel central to the whole project. Blowing Away is one of those moments when the album stops performing confidence and starts admitting uncertainty.
Decades later, that is why her version still rewards close listening. It is not the loudest track, not the most famous single, and not the song most likely to define the album in a quick summary. But it shows Ronstadt at one of her most essential tasks: honoring another writer’s truth while revealing her own. In Blowing Away, she does not merely cover Eric Kaz. She carries the song into a wider emotional sky, where the ache is visible, the melody keeps moving, and the listener is left with the feeling of something beautiful just out of reach.
