On Living in the USA, Linda Ronstadt took Laura Nyro’s Blowing Away and let it expand from private turbulence into wide-open pop weather.
When Linda Ronstadt included Blowing Away on her 1978 album Living in the USA, she was doing more than adding another well-chosen cover to an already adventurous record. Released on Asylum and produced by Peter Asher, Living in the USA reached No. 1 on the Billboard album chart and captured Ronstadt at a moment when her reputation as an interpreter had become almost as important as her voice itself. The album moved across American popular music with unusual confidence: Chuck Berry, Elvis Costello, the Miracles, Warren Zevon, Little Feat, and Laura Nyro all sat within the same bright, restless frame. In that company, Blowing Away became one of the album’s most revealing acts of transformation.
The song came from Laura Nyro, one of the most distinctive songwriter voices of the late 1960s, whose work often folded soul, gospel, pop, jazz feeling, and urban romantic drama into compact emotional storms. Nyro first recorded the song, often styled as Blowin’ Away, during the period of her 1967 debut More Than a New Discovery, later known to many listeners through its reissue title The First Songs. In Nyro’s world, the song feels inward and quicksilver, driven by sudden turns of feeling and melody. It does not move like a standard pop confession. It darts, aches, flashes, and changes shape before the listener can quite settle into it.
Ronstadt’s genius was that she rarely treated another writer’s song as a museum piece. She did not simply preserve Laura Nyro’s restlessness; she translated it. On Living in the USA, Blowing Away is given a broader, cleaner, more panoramic setting. The emotional center remains unstable, but the surface opens up. Where Nyro could sound like a city room full of ghosts and gospel echoes, Ronstadt brings the song toward a California horizon, letting the melody breathe in long lines and high, gleaming arcs. The result is not a softening so much as a change in pressure. The song still carries hurt, but it no longer feels trapped inside itself.
That difference matters because Ronstadt’s late-1970s records were often built on the tension between polish and feeling. Peter Asher’s production gave her albums shape, clarity, and radio-ready scale, yet the best performances never lose their emotional grain. Ronstadt could sing with enormous force, but her power was not only in volume or range. It was in the way she chose where to hold back, where to lean into a word, and where to let the arrangement carry the wind around her. In Blowing Away, she sounds less like someone explaining pain than someone moving through it at speed, trying to remain upright while memory keeps changing direction.
That is the heart of the cover’s reinvention. Ronstadt does not turn Nyro into herself by erasing the original’s eccentric beauty. Instead, she finds another route through the same emotional weather. Her version makes the song more outward-facing, more sweeping, more immediate for listeners who knew Ronstadt as a bridge between country-rock, pop, R&B, and the great American songbook of feeling. She had already shown that a great singer could make older or borrowed songs feel newly present without pretending they had no history. Here, she lets Laura Nyro’s writing keep its nerve while placing it inside the luminous architecture of a major 1978 pop album.
Heard within Living in the USA, Blowing Away also helps explain why the album was more than a collection of stylish covers. It was a portrait of Ronstadt’s musical appetite. She was not chasing one lane. She was gathering songs that could withstand the pressure of her voice and the refinement of Asher’s studio world. Some tracks on the album announce themselves immediately; others work more quietly, revealing how carefully she listened to writers who came from very different corners of popular music. Blowing Away belongs to that second category: a song whose importance grows as the ear notices how much emotional intelligence is inside the performance.
What stays with the listener is the sense of motion. The title itself suggests something being scattered or carried off, and Ronstadt sings as if that movement is both danger and release. There is sorrow in the song, but there is also air. That is why her version remains such a strong example of cover reinvention: it proves that honoring a song does not always mean staying close to its first atmosphere. Sometimes it means finding the space the song secretly asked for all along. In Ronstadt’s hands, Blowing Away becomes not a replacement for Nyro’s vision, but a second weather system moving across the same emotional sky.
