A Solitary Heartbeat Echoing Through Time’s Quiet Rooms
When Linda Ronstadt released her haunting rendition of “What’ll I Do?” on her 1983 album What’s New, the song became both a revival and a revelation. The album, her first collaboration with legendary arranger and conductor Nelson Riddle, soared to the Top 10 on the Billboard 200 and achieved multi‑platinum status—an extraordinary accomplishment for a collection of pre‑rock standards in an age dominated by synthesizers and MTV polish. Yet within that success, this particular track emerged as a quiet centerpiece, a wistful confession carried on the breath of an artist rediscovering the raw vulnerability of songcraft that predates her own stardom.
The origins of “What’ll I Do?” stretch back to 1923, when Irving Berlin penned it as a lament of longing so pure that it seemed to transcend time. Its melody is deceptively simple, yet its emotional gravity is immense—a solitary voice reaching toward a love lost to distance, perhaps to fate. In Ronstadt’s interpretation, the song ceases to be a relic of the Jazz Age and becomes a timeless confession, rendered with the poise of a seasoned singer who has seen both the heights of fame and the ache of solitude that often shadows it.
Nelson Riddle’s orchestration unfolds like memory itself—lush yet disciplined, full of breath between the notes. The strings do not merely accompany Ronstadt; they encircle her, offering a cushion for her crystalline tone to rest upon. His arrangement pays homage to the classic big‑band ballad style he perfected with Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, yet here it serves a more intimate purpose. The grandeur of the orchestra only magnifies the song’s isolation: the more expansive the sound, the smaller the singer seems within it. That contrast is the heart of “What’ll I Do?”—a portrait of loneliness painted in rich, orchestral color.
Ronstadt approached this project not as an act of nostalgia but as a reclamation. After dominating rock and pop radio throughout the 1970s, she turned deliberately toward the Great American Songbook, guided by curiosity rather than commercial calculation. Her voice—once a vehicle for California cool—was now an instrument of restraint and discipline. In “What’ll I Do?”, she trades the open‑throated power of her rock performances for a fragile intimacy that borders on silence. Every note feels suspended between resignation and hope, as though she were trying to summon a vanished lover with nothing but air and memory.
The song endures because it captures an emotion that defies era or genre: the quiet devastation of absence. Ronstadt does not simply interpret Berlin’s lament; she inhabits it, giving voice to that moment when love has gone but its echo refuses to fade. Listening now, decades later, one hears not just a torch song but a meditation on impermanence itself—a reminder that even in the most glittering phases of a career, the heart remains beautifully, painfully human.