“The Waiting” becomes a gentle triumph in Linda Ronstadt’s hands—proof that patience can ache like heartbreak, yet still feel like hope you can sing through.
By the time Linda Ronstadt recorded “The Waiting,” she had nothing left to prove to the world—only something to say to it. Her version appeared as the opening track on Feels Like Home, released March 14, 1995 on Elektra, co-produced by Ronstadt and George Massenburg. The album itself reached No. 75 on the Billboard album chart and stayed there 12 weeks, a modest commercial footprint for an artist of her stature, yet a telling one: this was late-period Ronstadt, choosing taste, warmth, and craft over spectacle.
Most importantly for accuracy—and for the song’s emotional DNA—“The Waiting” is a Tom Petty composition. It was originally released by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in 1981 as the lead single from Hard Promises, where it climbed to No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Rock Tracks (holding that rock summit for six weeks). Petty explained that the title sprang from a line associated with Janis Joplin—the weary touring truth that everything else is just waiting. It’s a sharp insight: life isn’t only made of big moments; it’s made of the long corridors between them.
Ronstadt didn’t treat “The Waiting” as a museum piece. She treated it like a living thing—something that could be carried from one decade to the next without losing its pulse. In fact, her recording wasn’t just an album track. A double-sided single pairing “The Waiting” with “Walk On” was released simultaneously with the album. That release strategy says a lot: Ronstadt’s team heard “The Waiting” not as a deep-cut indulgence, but as a front-porch invitation—“come in, sit down, listen closely.” Meanwhile, the companion side “Walk On” notably returned Ronstadt to the Billboard Country Singles chart for the first time as a solo artist since 1983 (outside the late-’80s Trio era).
So what does “The Waiting” mean when Ronstadt sings it?
In Petty’s original, the song’s bright guitars and forward-leaning groove make waiting feel like a test of nerve—restless, stubborn, half-defiant. Ronstadt, by contrast, brings a different kind of authority: the authority of someone who has waited in more rooms than she ever wanted to enter. Her voice doesn’t need to push the lyric; it simply rests inside it. And that changes the emotional center of gravity. The line “The waiting is the hardest part” stops sounding like a slogan and starts sounding like a truth you learn slowly, the way you learn the shape of your own loss.
There’s also a subtle kind of grace in how the song’s optimism survives its fatigue. The lyric insists on “faith,” on taking it “to the heart,” on enduring day after day—measured not in miracles but in yards, inches, small gains. (Apple Music’s credits for Ronstadt’s recording list Tom Petty as songwriter and show the track dated to the album release, reinforcing the cover’s lineage.) In Ronstadt’s interpretation, those lines feel less like pep talk and more like lived practice: not blind positivity, but the stubborn decision to keep believing that tomorrow can still open its hands.
That’s the song’s quiet power in 1995. Linda Ronstadt wasn’t trying to sound young; she was trying to sound true. She framed “The Waiting” within Feels Like Home’s country-rock warmth—an album built around comfort, memory, and the soft glow of mature musicianship. In that setting, “waiting” isn’t only romantic suspense. It becomes a broader human condition: waiting for love to steady itself, for grief to loosen its grip, for the heart to catch up with what the mind already knows.
And when the track ends, what lingers is not just the hook—it’s the feeling that patience can be both painful and noble. “The Waiting,” sung by Linda Ronstadt, is a reminder that the hardest part is still survivable… and that sometimes the only way through the long in-between is to keep a melody close enough to breathe with you.