The Long Way Around captures an early Linda Ronstadt still finding her road, and somehow sounding wiser because she refused the easy one.
Long before Linda Ronstadt became one of the defining voices of 1970s American music, she was already drawn to songs that carried a little dust on their boots and a little ache in their bones. “The Long Way Around”, from her 1969 solo debut Hand Sown… Home Grown, belongs to that earlier chapter. It was not released as one of her major breakthrough singles, and it did not make a separate run up the Billboard Hot 100. In pure chart terms, it was never a headline hit. But that fact now feels almost beside the point. Some songs announce themselves with numbers. Others stay with people because they reveal the artist before the fame hardens the image. This is one of those songs.
That is part of what makes “The Long Way Around” so compelling. It arrived before the era of “You’re No Good” reaching No. 1, before “When Will I Be Loved” climbed to No. 2, before “Blue Bayou” became one of the most beloved records of her career. On paper, it was a quieter moment. In spirit, it was a crucial one. The song sits inside a period when Ronstadt was shaping the emotional and musical identity that would later make the whole country-rock world feel more intimate, more vulnerable, and more human.
Musically, “The Long Way Around” carries the feel of a journey not taken in triumph, but in reflection. It is not about speed, swagger, or the open-road fantasy that so many songs lean on. Instead, it feels like the sound of someone choosing the harder route because the shorter one no longer tells the truth. That emotional idea gave Ronstadt an ideal space to do what she did better than almost anyone: sing with strength while letting sorrow remain visible. She never had to oversell pain. She could let it breathe. And in a song like this, that restraint becomes its own kind of power.
There is also a larger story behind it. Hand Sown… Home Grown came out after her years with the Stone Poneys, when the easy move might have been to chase a safer pop identity. Instead, she leaned toward country, folk, and roots music at a time when those boundaries were still shifting in California and across American radio. The album itself has often been remembered as an important early statement in the rise of country-rock. That context matters. “The Long Way Around” does not just sound like a song about detours; it came from a moment when Ronstadt herself was taking one artistically. She was following taste, instinct, and feeling rather than fashion.
What makes the performance linger is the way Ronstadt understands the emotional distance inside the title. The “long way around” is not merely geography. It is memory. It is pride. It is the extra miles people travel when they are not ready to say plainly what they feel. In lesser hands, that idea can sound decorative. In Ronstadt’s voice, it sounds lived-in. There is tenderness in the phrasing, but there is also steel there, the same steel that would define so many of her greatest records. She knew that sadness and dignity often arrive together.
Listeners who first discovered Linda Ronstadt through the bigger hits sometimes circle back to songs like this and hear a different kind of revelation. The chart-toppers showed how powerful she was. Deep cuts like “The Long Way Around” show how perceptive she was. She did not just sing beautifully. She chose material with emotional architecture. She understood songs that had corners, shadows, and hesitations. That instinct became one of the deepest strengths of her entire catalog.
And perhaps that is why this song still holds its own quiet place. It never had the commercial profile of her most famous singles, but it offered an early glimpse of the artist she was becoming: fearless without being loud, emotionally open without ever sounding fragile, and deeply committed to songs that respected the complexity of real feeling. For many listeners, that is where the real bond with Linda Ronstadt begins.
So if “The Long Way Around” feels a little more private than the songs that later made her a household name, that may be exactly its gift. It reminds us that before the awards, before the platinum albums, and before the massive chart peaks, Ronstadt was already walking toward greatness in the most revealing way possible: one beautifully chosen song at a time, taking the road that asked more of her and gave more back in return.
