On “Try Me Again,” Linda Ronstadt stepped from interpreter to co-writer, letting a private kind of vulnerability sit inside one of her most celebrated albums.
“Try Me Again” appears on Linda Ronstadt’s 1976 album Hasten Down the Wind, released on Asylum Records during the richest commercial stretch of her 1970s career. The song matters not only because Ronstadt recorded it, but because she co-wrote it with Andrew Gold, the gifted multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who was deeply woven into her studio world at the time. In a catalog famous for interpretation — for taking songs by other writers and making them sound newly inhabited — a Ronstadt writing credit carries a special charge. It feels less like a routine album cut and more like a small door left open.
By 1976, Ronstadt had already become one of the defining voices of American popular music. Heart Like a Wheel and Prisoner in Disguise had brought her a remarkable run of acclaim and radio visibility, and Hasten Down the Wind arrived with the confidence of an artist who understood both her audience and her own reach. The album drew from the broad territory she made her own: country, folk, rock, old pop, and the emerging Los Angeles singer-songwriter language of the decade. It included material associated with writers such as Warren Zevon, Karla Bonoff, and Willie Nelson, and the album went on to earn Ronstadt the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. Yet amid that gathering of strong outside voices, “Try Me Again” stands apart because the song came, at least in part, from Ronstadt herself.
That distinction changes the way the recording is heard. Ronstadt was never merely a singer who covered songs. Her great art was selection, trust, and transformation. She seemed to know which lyric would open under her voice, which melody could hold both strength and uncertainty, which old song still had breath in it. Her interpretive gift was so complete that many listeners experienced her versions as definitive, even when the songs had traveled through other hands first. But with “Try Me Again”, the line between interpreter and source becomes more intimate. The emotional distance narrows. The singer is not simply entering another writer’s room; she has helped build the room.
Andrew Gold was an ideal collaborator for that kind of moment. In Ronstadt’s mid-1970s recordings, he was part of the musical architecture behind the polish and emotional lift. Gold brought a sharp melodic sense, instrumental fluency, and a feeling for pop structure that could make a track sound effortless without making it slight. He was not just a background presence in that Los Angeles circle; he was one of the musicians who helped give Ronstadt’s records their balance of sheen and earth. A co-write between Ronstadt and Gold suggests the kind of studio trust that rarely needs to announce itself. It is the sound of two musicians working from familiarity rather than spectacle.
The title itself, “Try Me Again”, carries the emotional gravity of the song before a note is even heard. It is not a grand declaration. It is a request. The phrase has humility in it, but also nerve. To ask to be tried again is to admit that something has already been tested, missed, doubted, or mishandled. It suggests the complicated space between apology and persistence, between wanting another chance and knowing that another chance must be earned. In Ronstadt’s hands, that kind of emotional territory rarely turns theatrical. She had a voice capable of filling a room with force, but her deepest power often came from clarity — from the way she could let a line stand without crowding it.
That restraint is part of what makes “Try Me Again” valuable as a songwriter spotlight. It does not need to be treated as a hidden manifesto or a secret confession. The better way to hear it is as a rare instance of Ronstadt allowing her own writing to sit beside the work of the songwriters she admired. On Hasten Down the Wind, where the album’s emotional range moves through longing, release, memory, and adult uncertainty, this co-written track becomes a modest but revealing piece of the larger portrait. It shows Ronstadt not only as the great chooser of songs, but as someone who understood the mechanics of feeling from the inside: how a phrase can bend, how a plea can remain dignified, how melody can make vulnerability sound steady rather than helpless.
The 1970s Los Angeles recording world often thrived on that mixture of craft and closeness. Musicians moved through one another’s sessions, songwriters passed work from hand to hand, and country-rock textures met radio-ready pop without always needing a border between them. Ronstadt was at the center of that world, but she was never swallowed by it. Her records kept returning to the human voice as the final truth. Whatever the arrangement, whatever the genre, the test was whether the song could survive direct emotional contact. “Try Me Again” survives because it does not overreach. It stays close to its own premise: a voice asking for reconsideration, not with grand persuasion, but with the quiet insistence of someone who still believes there is something worth hearing.
Seen from a distance, the song may look like one track among many on a major 1976 album. But for those who listen closely to the shape of Ronstadt’s career, it has a particular glow. It reminds us that even an artist celebrated for interpreting others had her own way of entering the songwriting conversation. She did it sparingly, and perhaps that is why this recording feels so personal without needing to be explained. Linda Ronstadt built much of her legacy by revealing the emotional truth in songs she did not write. With “Try Me Again”, co-written with Andrew Gold, she offered a glimpse of what happened when that truth began closer to home.
