Tucson’s Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Linda Ronstadt, back in the spotlight partly because Selena Gomez is set to star in a biopic about her, sings the praises of her hometown in a New York Times article published Tuesday.
Her list of five favorite places to visit in Tucson contains no surprises, but she describes her connections to them in intimate and intricate details.
Linda Ronstadt attending the renaming of the Tucson Music Hall to the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall in 2022.
At Mission San Xavier del Bac, for instance, she recalls lighting candles with slide guitarist/songwriter Ry Cooder; and seeking respite, mid-recording-session, with fellow chanteuse Emmylou Harris, with whom she dueted on 1999’s “Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions.”
That album was recorded at the Arizona Inn and Ronstadt tells the paper, “It’s my favorite hotel in the world.”
She cites the history, lore and landscaping, in addition to the hotel's Audubon Bar & Patio with its piano, “and the fireplace and sunlight that illuminate her favorite guest room.”
Ronstadt, 77, has long lived in the San Francisco Bay Area but says she stays at the inn when visiting.
She also lists artisanal baker Don Guerra’s Barrio Bread — “I always go there straight from the airport” for her go-to order, the Cubano with sesame seeds; Mission Garden, the ode to more than 4,000 years of local agriculture, with Indigenous, Spanish, Chinese and Mexican plots; and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which she lauds for feeling “refreshingly untamed,” the Times writes.
“You’re not looking at some perfect geometry imposed on the desert,” Ronstadt says of the animals’ habitats at the Desert Museum. “Nature hates perfect geometry.”
Those are the top five attractions of “Linda Ronstadt’s Tucson,” as the article is titled.
But she spreads some love for other spots, too, in this city where she was born and raised — El Minuto Cafe, Hotel Congress, the Fox Tucson Theatre “where her father used to perform as Gil Ronstadt and His Star-Spangled Megaphone,” and the 1927 Temple of Music and Art, which she says is “just magic.”
Linda Ronstadt at the Tucson Festival of Books on March 5, 2023, talking about her book “Feels like Home."
As for San Xavier Mission, she reveals, “I’m an atheist, but I baptized my children there,” as she feels magic behind its walls, too.
She’s “adjusted the patron saint’s prayer-charm-studded blanket ‘to make sure he’s comfortable.’”
“Atheist or not, she finds something sacred there. To borrow from the Latin choral classic on her recently rereleased Christmas album: Life is full of ‘mysterium’,” writes the author of the Times article, Abbie Kozolchyk, who was also born and raised in Tucson.
