A young woman choosing the harder road, where pride, regret, and tenderness all walk side by side
In “The Long Way Around” (often listed simply as “Long Way Around”), Linda Ronstadt sounds like someone standing on the edge of a decision that will shape the rest of her life. The song comes from her first solo album, Hand Sown… Home Grown, released in 1969 — the record where she stepped out from the shadow of the Stone Poneys and began, quietly but firmly, to claim her own voice. Two singles were spun from that album: “Baby You’ve Been on My Mind” and “Long Way Around,” issued by Capitol in 1969 and later resurfacing as part of a double-A-side single with “(She’s A) Very Lovely Woman” in the early ’70s. Though it never became a major hit, it has the feel of a song that was always meant more for patient listeners than for the charts.
On Hand Sown… Home Grown, the track sits in the midst of a brave little experiment: country-rock before it became fashionable, folk edges still clinging to the corners, Los Angeles and Nashville tugging at each sleeve. You can almost hear Ronstadt finding herself in real time. The production is modest by later standards — a small band, warm guitars, a rhythm that moves without hurrying — but there’s a certain confidence in its simplicity. Nothing gets in the way of the voice, and that voice, even here, is already unmistakable: clear, steady, edged with steel and vulnerability in equal measure.
The story inside “Long Way Around” is one many grown hearts will recognize. Without leaning heavily on the exact lines, you can feel it: someone looking back at choices made in haste, admitting to having been wrong, realizing that healing and understanding won’t come by cutting corners. There is a lover, a hurt, and a sense that apologies, if they are to mean anything, must be lived out, not just spoken. Taking “the long way around” becomes more than just a physical journey; it’s a way of saying: I know this will take time. I know I have work to do. I’m willing to walk every mile if it leads me back to what matters.
Ronstadt sings it not as a girl begging, but as a young woman who has already discovered that pride and love can pull in opposite directions. There’s a hint of stubbornness, but it isn’t selfish; it’s the stubbornness of someone who refuses to pretend. She won’t pretend the hurt didn’t happen, and she won’t pretend the love isn’t still there. That tension gives the song its emotional depth. Her voice rides the melody with a kind of resigned strength, as if she’s already accepted that she can’t undo the past, only meet the future with more honesty than before.
In the broader arc of her career, “Long Way Around” is an early signpost. Hand Sown… Home Grown didn’t break into the album charts, selling only modestly at the time, but critics already sensed something important. They heard a singer who could bridge folk, country, and rock, a woman unafraid to stand in the middle of those currents and see where they carried her. Songs like this one pointed toward what she would later achieve on albums such as Heart Like a Wheel and Prisoner in Disguise — that unmistakable blend of interpretive intelligence and emotional truth.
For listeners who come back to “The Long Way Around” now, especially with many years behind them, the song can feel almost like a letter from a younger self. It may remind you of the first time you understood that relationships don’t break or mend overnight. Of the seasons when you knew you had been unkind, or careless, and realized there was no quick way to set things right — only the slow, steady effort of showing up differently, day after day. The phrase “long way around” begins to sound less like inconvenience and more like a kind of grace: the chance to walk, to think, to become worthy of the forgiveness you’re hoping for.
There is also a special kind of nostalgia woven into the sound of the recording itself. The modest arrangements, the analog warmth, the feel of a small band breathing together in the room — all of it carries the quiet courage of those late-’60s experiments, when young musicians were still learning how country and rock could speak to each other. You can almost see the era in the song: small clubs, worn carpets on stage, the smell of amplifiers heating up, a young singer closing her eyes as she reaches for a line that matters more than she can yet explain.
In the end, “The Long Way Around” is not one of the famous signboard titles in Linda Ronstadt’s long career. It doesn’t have the instant recognition of “Blue Bayou” or “You’re No Good.” But it belongs to that quieter category of songs that reveal a person’s character long before the world knows their name. It shows us a young woman ready to own her mistakes, willing to take the harder path, and already capable of turning private reckoning into something that feels, in its small, steady way, universal.
For those listening with a lifetime’s worth of detours behind them, the song offers a companionable truth: sometimes the straightest line back to the heart is not straight at all. Sometimes you really do have to take the long way around — and if you’re lucky, there is still someone waiting at the end of the road when you finally arrive.