“Long Long Time” is the sound of loving someone past the point of dignity—yet still speaking that love aloud, softly, because silence would feel like a second loss.
Released as a single in June 1970 (Capitol; B-side “Nobody’s”), Linda Ronstadt’s “Long Long Time” became the first true solo breakthrough that pointed toward the giant career waiting just a few years ahead. Written by Gary White and produced by Elliot Mazer, the song first appeared on Ronstadt’s second solo album Silk Purse (originally released April 13, 1970).
On the charts, its story is quietly satisfying—more slow-burn than lightning strike. “Long Long Time” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 82 on the chart dated August 15, 1970, and it ultimately rose to No. 25, with its Hot 100 peak dated October 10, 1970. It also reached No. 20 on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart, showing how naturally its tenderness fit the gentler side of AM radio at the time. And in 1971, the performance earned Ronstadt a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Vocal Performance, Female—a sign that the industry heard something special in her voice even before superstardom made it obvious.
But “special” is almost too clean a word for what the record delivers. “Long Long Time” doesn’t sparkle; it aches. The lyric is a confession without decoration: a narrator who has tried everything she knows—patience, devotion, sheer will—and still can’t make the beloved choose her. What makes it devastating is the lack of villainy. There’s no grand betrayal, no melodramatic twist. Just the blunt, adult truth that love can be sincere and still be unreturned.
Ronstadt’s gift here is her emotional posture. She doesn’t perform heartbreak as spectacle. She holds it like a fragile object, turning it slowly in the light. There’s restraint in her phrasing—yet not the icy kind. It’s the restraint of someone trying to stay upright while admitting something humiliatingly human: I love you, and it has been a long, long time. The pain isn’t only that the love isn’t reciprocated; it’s that time has been invested, hope has been spent, and the heart—stubborn creature—hasn’t learned the lesson the mind already knows.
The backstory around the recording adds another, almost tender irony. Ronstadt later spoke critically about Silk Purse, suggesting she didn’t feel fully formed as a singer yet, and even voiced doubts about the vocal on “Long Long Time.” But she also acknowledged, in retrospect, that the song effectively “bought” her time—time to grow into the powerhouse she would soon become. That’s one of music’s quiet miracles: sometimes the very record an artist questions becomes the bridge that carries them forward.
Placed within Silk Purse, a record often described as Ronstadt leaning into country textures and Nashville polish, “Long Long Time” feels like the emotional center of gravity—a ballad that doesn’t rely on genre so much as gravity itself. And heard now, decades later, it still lands because it isn’t dated by fashion. Unrequited love doesn’t modernize. It doesn’t improve with technology. The heart still bargains the same way, still replays the same moments, still clings to the same “maybe tomorrow.”
That’s why “Long Long Time” endures as more than an early hit. It’s a portrait of devotion when devotion becomes a kind of private weather—something you live under, day after day, even when no one else can see the clouds. Linda Ronstadt sings it not as a victim, but as a witness: to her own feeling, to her own honesty, to the long stretch of time it can take before we finally stop trying to “make you mine” and accept what the silence has been saying all along.
