“Try Me Again” is the sound of pride surrendering—one last drive past a familiar window, hoping love can be restarted before it becomes only memory.
By the time Linda Ronstadt released Hasten Down the Wind on August 9, 1976, she was no longer merely a great singer with great taste—she was a cultural force, the kind of voice that could make new writers famous and old standards feel newly bruised. The album climbed to a No. 3 peak on the Billboard 200 (Billboard itself shows the project’s peak at 3). On the country side, it also hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums—a reminder that Ronstadt’s “pop” success never required her to abandon her country instincts. And in 1977, the album earned her a Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female, sealing that era of her career with a prize that felt like both recognition and inevitability.
Inside that triumph sits “Try Me Again”—a song that doesn’t swagger the way her hits could, but instead aches. It appears on the album as track 3 on Side Two, and it’s one of the record’s most personal fingerprints because Ronstadt co-wrote it with Andrew Gold. The album was produced by Peter Asher, whose gift was always to frame big emotion with elegance rather than excess; here, that restraint becomes part of the heartbreak.
Chart-wise, “Try Me Again” is not remembered as a major A-side. It didn’t arrive with a clean Hot 100 “debut position” attached to its name. Instead, it lived the way many beloved Ronstadt tracks live: tucked into the album, discovered and rediscovered, carried forward by listeners who knew that her deepest songs were often not the loudest ones. There was a single configuration that paired “That’ll Be the Day” with “Try Me Again” on the flip side—documented in 1976 disc listings—so the song did physically travel into the world on a 45, even if it never became the headline.
But the real “story behind” “Try Me Again” isn’t about promotional strategy. It’s about how it was born. A recent deep-dive recounts Ronstadt describing, in a 1984 interview, that the song began after a breakup—driving around, talking to friends, feeling the bottom drop out—and then, the next day, pulling her car over and writing it down on the back of a parking ticket. That detail matters because it explains the song’s particular realism. “Try Me Again” doesn’t sound like a carefully staged heartbreak; it sounds like the moment after the adrenaline fades, when you’re left with the plain fact that you miss someone who has stopped choosing you.
The lyric’s emotional center is painfully ordinary in the best way: the drive-by, the glance through the window, the yearning to be seen again—not as a mistake, not as a chapter to close, but as a person worth taking another chance on. That’s why the title hits so hard. Try is a small word, almost humble, yet it carries enormous weight: it admits the past didn’t work, but insists the future might—if love can still find the will.
What makes Ronstadt extraordinary here is the way she balances strength and vulnerability without tipping into melodrama. Even at the height of her 1970s dominance, she could sing like someone who didn’t feel dominant at all—like someone who had been proud, yes, but was now willing to put pride down for a moment, just to ask. And the collaboration with Andrew Gold—a writer-musician with a keen sense of melody and emotional timing—gives the song a shape that feels inevitable, as though the chorus has been waiting quietly under the verse the whole time.
It’s also worth remembering what the album represented: Hasten Down the Wind “showcased Ronstadt the singer-songwriter,” highlighting that she co-wrote “Try Me Again” (and another track) amid a set largely built from carefully chosen outside material. That’s a subtle but important shift in the Ronstadt myth. She wasn’t only the great interpreter. On “Try Me Again,” she steps into authorship—placing her own heartbreak on the record, not hidden behind a cover version’s safe distance.
So when you listen now, decades removed from 1976, “Try Me Again” doesn’t just evoke an era of radio and vinyl. It evokes a feeling many people recognize with a quiet shiver: the moment you realize you’d rather risk one more “no” than live with the permanent silence of never asking.