Linda Ronstadt Opens Up About Giving Up Singing

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Linda Ronstadt hasn’t been able to sing publicly in years because of her Parkinson’s Disease, but that doesn’t mean she still doesn’t sing, although nobody gets to hear it anymore. 

“Oh, I can sing in my brain; I sing in my brain all the time,” she tells "CBS Sunday Morning." “But it's not quite the same as doing it physically. You know, there's a physical feeling in singing that's just like skiing down a hill, except better, 'cause I'm not a very good skier!"

Linda says she first noticed her voice going in 2000, explaining, “I'd start to sing and then it would just clamp up. It was, like, a cramp. My voice would freeze. And I said, 'There's something wrong with my voice.' And people would say, 'Oh, you're just a perfectionist.' I go, 'No, there's really something systemically wrong.'” She adds, "And it's very slow-moving, this disease, so it took a long time to really finally manifest."

Ronstadt actually retired from singing before she even got her Parkinson’s diagnosis. “Oh yeah. I was just yelling. Instead of singing, I was just kind of yelling. I didn't want to charge people for that," she says. "It wasn't any fun anymore. You know, singing is … there are really a lot of things you can do with your voice; you can slide on all different sorts of textures and things. And if you're not doing that, it's not interesting."

• ONE MORE THING! Linda admits that she keeps her 2013 National Medal of Arts under her bed, noting “it’s kinda big” and she didn’t know what to do with it. She put it there with the crowbar she keeps in case there’s an earthquake and she has to pry the roof off of her.

Source: CBS Sunday Morning