On Get Closer, Linda Ronstadt turned The Knickerbockers’ Lies from a sharp 1960s garage-pop jolt into a full-bodied rock charge that showed how freely she could cross musical borders.
When Linda Ronstadt placed Lies on her 1982 album Get Closer, she was not simply reaching into the oldies bin for a familiar spark. The album, released on Asylum and produced by Peter Asher, arrived at a fascinating hinge point in her career: after years of defining the sophisticated edge of country-rock and pop-rock, and just before her widely noticed turn toward classic pop standards with What’s New in 1983. In that setting, her cover of The Knickerbockers’ Lies becomes more than a quick blast of retro energy. It sounds like a singer testing how much force an old song can still carry when it is pulled into a new era with no apology.
The original Lies, written by Knickerbockers members Beau Charles and Buddy Randell, was first released in the mid-1960s and became a Top 20 U.S. pop hit in 1966. The record has long been remembered for its crisp, Beatles-like attack: the clipped urgency, the bright harmonies, the sense of a young band racing toward the chorus as if the whole thing might fly apart. It was garage-pop with polish, a song built on accusation and motion. The lyric is not complicated, and that is part of its strength. Someone has been deceived. Someone is angry enough to say the word out loud. The melody does not sit still long enough to dress the feeling up.
Ronstadt’s version respects that compact design, but she does not treat it like a museum piece. On Get Closer, Lies becomes a driving rock performance with a harder frame around it. The song’s 1960s snap remains visible, yet the sound is thicker, more muscular, more rooted in the Los Angeles studio-rock language Ronstadt understood so well. Instead of trying to mimic The Knickerbockers’ boyish British Invasion energy, she gives the song an adult voltage. Her voice cuts through the arrangement with control, but not neatness. She can make a phrase sound clean and bruised at the same time, and that quality matters here. Lies is a song about betrayal, but in her hands it is not only complaint; it becomes propulsion.
That is where the cross-genre story becomes most interesting. Ronstadt was often described through categories: country-rock singer, pop singer, rock singer, interpreter of standards, later a champion of Mexican song traditions. But the categories never quite explain what she did inside a recording. Her gift was not merely the ability to move from one style to another. It was the ability to understand the emotional grammar of a song and then let the arrangement follow. With Lies, she hears the garage-band impatience of the original, the pop precision of its hook, and the rock-and-roll charge underneath it. She brings them together without sanding off the edges.
On Get Closer, that approach fits the larger mood of the album. The record does not belong to a single narrow lane. It includes contemporary material, older pop instincts, rock energy, and the kind of interpretive singing that had become Ronstadt’s signature. Lies may be brief and direct, but it helps reveal the album’s restless character. It is the sound of an artist who had already proved she could turn other people’s songs into deeply personal statements, still choosing not to settle into one safe identity. The track moves quickly, but it leaves a clue: Ronstadt was not leaving rock behind as she expanded her repertoire. She was carrying its urgency with her.
Heard now, her Lies has a different kind of freshness from the original. The Knickerbockers captured the flash of a mid-1960s pop moment, when a three-minute single could sound like a dare. Ronstadt turns that same dare into something broader, less teenage, more seasoned, without making it heavy-handed. There is a toughness in the way she delivers the title word, but also a precision that keeps the song from becoming bluster. She knows the value of restraint. She lets the band drive, lets the chorus land, and lets the anger stay musical.
That may be why this cover still feels worth returning to. It is not the most discussed track in her catalog, and it does not need to be elevated into something it never claimed to be. Its power is smaller, sharper, and more revealing. In less than a few minutes, Linda Ronstadt shows how a 1960s garage-pop hit by The Knickerbockers could become part of her own rock vocabulary on Get Closer. She does not erase the past. She accelerates it, sings through it, and proves that a good song can change shape without losing its nerve.
