“Colorado” is Linda Ronstadt singing a love letter to a place she can’t quite return to—home as a landscape, home as a feeling, home as the one calm speed your heart still remembers.
There are songs that chase romance, and songs that chase freedom—but “Colorado” chases belonging. In 1974, it even stepped out on its own as a single, issued by Asylum Records in May 1974, paired with “Desperado” on the flip side. On paper, that’s a curious coupling: one song an aching postcard back to the mountains, the other a plea to a hardened drifter. Yet emotionally they rhyme—both are about the high price of distance, and the quiet human hunger to be understood.
Here’s the chart truth, as cleanly as it can be stated. “Colorado” did not become a major Hot 100 hit; it peaked at No. 108 in the U.S., meaning it bubbled just outside the main Billboard Hot 100. That number might sound small—until you remember what kind of song this is. “Colorado” isn’t built like a radio racehorse. It’s built like a long exhale. It’s the kind of track that people keep for themselves, the way you keep a photograph tucked in a drawer: not because it’s flashy, but because it’s true.
Ronstadt recorded “Colorado” for her album Don’t Cry Now, released October 1, 1973—her first album on Asylum and the beginning of her long creative partnership with producer Peter Asher. On the original LP, “Colorado” sits on Side Two and runs 4:18, an expansive length that lets the yearning stretch out naturally instead of being trimmed into a quick hook. The album itself reached No. 45 on the Billboard 200, and later earned Gold certification in the U.S.—a sign that even before her blockbuster mid-’70s superstardom, her voice was already finding its people.
The song’s lineage makes its homesickness even more poignant. “Colorado” was written by Rick Roberts and first released by The Flying Burrito Brothers in 1971—a band whose country-rock always carried the ache of motion, the romance of highways, and the loneliness that rides along for free. Ronstadt doesn’t copy their version—she reframes it. In her hands, the narrator’s return-dream becomes more intimate, more feminine, less swaggering: not a fantasy of conquest, but a plea for peace.
And what a plea it is. The lyric opens like a confession to an old friend—“Hey, Colorado…”—and from that first greeting you can feel the weight of time: it wasn’t so long ago, and yet it feels like another life. The narrator left the mountains to “try life on the road,” but the road, with all its speed and promise, starts to feel like a contest that never ends. That’s the emotional hinge of the song: the moment you realize you didn’t leave because you didn’t love home—you left because you thought you had to. And now you’re tired. Not bored. Not defeated. Simply tired in the way grown life can make you tired, when the pace is always “much too fast” and the heart begins to crave stillness more than applause.
There’s also a quietly beautiful irony in Ronstadt’s timing. When “Colorado” appeared on Don’t Cry Now, she was on the edge of her breakthrough years—right before the era when the world would treat her as a force of nature on the charts. Yet this performance already contains the mature Ronstadt gift: her ability to sound both strong and exposed, as if she’s singing from inside the feeling rather than about it. It’s not “acting.” It’s lived emotion delivered with perfect pitch and an almost painful calm.
The song’s meaning, finally, is as simple as it is enduring: home is not always a place you can return to on a map—but it remains a place your spirit keeps walking toward. “Colorado” understands that longing doesn’t always point to a person; sometimes it points to the version of yourself you were when the air felt clean, when your days felt slower, when you hadn’t yet learned how quickly the world can pull you away from what matters.
So even if “Colorado” only rose to No. 108, it still carries something chart positions can’t measure: the sound of a voice telling the truth about restlessness—and the soft, stubborn hope that somewhere beyond the noise, a quieter life is still waiting.