“But Not for Me” is the sound of romance turning its face away—smiling politely while the heart admits, with aching dignity, that happiness keeps choosing someone else.
When Linda Ronstadt sang “But Not for Me”, she wasn’t chasing a hit single or trying to modernize a standard with clever tricks. She was doing something rarer: stepping into the Great American Songbook as if it were a dimly lit room she’d always known, and letting the sadness settle naturally into the air. Her recording appears on For Sentimental Reasons—her third collaboration with arranger and bandleader Nelson Riddle—an album released in late 1986.
The track itself is pure pedigree. “But Not for Me” was written by George Gershwin (music) and Ira Gershwin (lyrics) for the Broadway musical Girl Crazy in 1930, introduced by Ginger Rogers in her Broadway debut. That origin matters, because the song is built like theatre: witty on the surface, quietly devastated underneath. The lyric doesn’t sob; it shrugs—yet that shrug is the most heartbreaking gesture of all. It’s the emotional posture of someone who has watched love arrive for other people again and again, and has learned to say, “Of course… not for me.”
Ronstadt’s version sits at track 4 on For Sentimental Reasons, running about 5:24—long enough to let the song’s rueful elegance unfold without haste. And while “But Not for Me” wasn’t promoted as a chart single (so there’s no clean “debut position” for the song itself), the album gives us the public footprint of this era: For Sentimental Reasons reached No. 46 on the Billboard 200 and No. 3 on Billboard’s Top Jazz Albums chart. Those numbers tell you something important: by the mid-’80s, Ronstadt could release an album of pre-rock standards—lush, adult, unhurried—and still command a wide audience. She wasn’t escaping her pop stardom; she was enlarging it, proving her voice belonged not only to the radio, but to history.
The story behind Ronstadt’s Songbook period is, in its own way, a story about bravery. In an era when mainstream success often demanded youth-coded trends, she chose to walk backward into America’s musical memory—into the sophisticated language of Gershwin and Porter and Berlin—trusting that emotional truth would outlast fashion. Nelson Riddle’s presence is crucial here: his orchestral style was the sound of classic pop glamour, the kind of arrangement that doesn’t just support a singer but frames them like cinema. And Ronstadt, with her famously clear, ringing tone, doesn’t drown in that velvet. She shines through it—yet with restraint, as if she understands that “too much” feeling would cheapen a song that is already quietly bleeding.
What does “But Not for Me” mean when Ronstadt sings it? It becomes less a show tune and more a confession said into the soft dark. The lyric is full of those almost-comic images—love and luck floating around like friendly spirits—only to be dismissed with that repeated conclusion: they don’t land here. The genius is that the song never claims the universe is cruel; it simply reports the pattern with weary grace. In Ronstadt’s hands, that grace doesn’t sound like resignation—it sounds like self-respect. There is a kind of pride in accepting disappointment without begging it to change.
And for listeners who’ve lived long enough to recognize the feeling—those seasons when everyone else seems to be chosen, promoted, embraced, forgiven—this song offers an almost tender companionship. It says: you’re not the only one who has watched the door open for others. You’re not the only one who has tried to smile convincingly at good news that wasn’t yours.
That is why Linda Ronstadt’s “But Not for Me” endures. Not because it is dramatic, but because it is honest. It makes loneliness sound dignified, and disappointment sound survivable. And when the final notes fade, you don’t feel pushed into despair—you feel understood, as if someone has quietly taken your hand and admitted, in the most human voice imaginable: yes… sometimes love is everywhere. But not for me.