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Nicolette Larson with Michael McDonald – “Let Me Go, Love”

TOP 40 DEBUT: February 16, 1980

PEAK POSITION: #35 (February 23, 1980)


Nicolette Larson came so close to stardom. She had the innocence of a gorgeous, glowing hippie chick; she sang with a sweetness that could melt glaciers. Her slightly countrified, SoCal pop recalled the similar work of Linda Ronstadt. She recorded with some of the same musicians who played for Ronstadt. She even had a big hit with a Neil Young song, just like Ronstadt. (Both women sang backup on Neil’s 1977 album American Stars ‘n Bars, effectively closing the circle.) Larson was all ready to be the next Linda Ronstadt—except she hit right at the time America started getting tired of Linda Ronstadt.


Scan the credits of any soft-rock or country record released between 1976 and 1980, and chances are you’ll spot Larson’s name in the credits. She sang backup for a dizzying list of artists: Emmylou Harris, The Doobie Brothers, Guy Clark, Christopher Cross, Rodney Crowell, even Ronstadt herself. (And Van Halen, believe it or not.) She’s easily one of the greatest harmony vocalists of that entire era, but under her own name, Larson only reached the Top 40 twice: once in ’78, with her near-perfect debut single, and again in early 1980, with the help of a much bigger artist.


“Let Me Go, Love,” a (sometimes) uncredited duet with Michael McDonald, turned out to be the only charting song from Larson’s underperforming second album, In The Nick Of Time. The tune spent a scant three weeks inside Billboard’s Top 40 before dropping like a rock in early March; of her next seven singles, just one even cracked the Hot 100. By 1983, she’d quit pop music altogether for a much hyped—if equally frustrating—career in country. Nicolette Larson had talent. She had connections. She was in the right place at the right time. Sometimes, all of that isn’t quite enough.


Born into a large family, Larson and her five siblings spent their childhoods moving around the country, thanks to her father’s job with the U.S. Treasury Department. Young Nicolette left her birthplace of Helena, Montana for Minneapolis, Birmingham, Boston, St. Louis, Portland, and finally Kansas City, where she graduated high school and attended a few semesters at the nearby University of Missouri. By age 21, she was living in San Francisco and volunteering at the Golden Gate County Bluegrass Festival. The musicians she met there encouraged her vocal ambitions, and within a few years, Larson had her first official album credit: “Backing Vocals” on Commander Cody’s 1975 album Tales From The Ozone.


Over the next two years, Larson toured with Cody’s band, relocated to Los Angeles, and added her earthy harmonies to records by Rodney Crowell, Billy Joe Shaver, and Jesse Colin Young. But her work on Emmylou Harris’ 1976 album Luxury Liner would prove most pivotal. Larson’s feature on the song “Hello Stranger” brought her to the attention of Harris’ old pal Linda Ronstadt, the reigning queen of SoCal country-pop. Ronstadt quickly befriended the 24-year-old singer, and when Neil Young phoned her for assistance in finding a backing vocalist, she recommended Larson. (I’ll apologize right now for how often Linda is going to pop up in Nicolette’s story.)


Within a week, Ronstadt and Larson were hanging out at Young’s La Honda ranch, cutting harmony tracks for American Stars ‘n Bars. (Neil christened them “The Saddlebags,” which just seems wrong.) Six months later, Nicolette flew to Nashville to sing backup (and a little bit of lead) on Young’s next album, Comes A Time. A few months after that, she was back in L.A., contributing harmonies (and a little more lead) to the Doobie Brothers’ multi-platinum effort, Minute By Minute.


Young and the Doobies were two of the biggest acts on Warner Brothers’ roster; Lenny Waronker, one of the most legendary record men in history, was the company’s current head of A&R. Waronker knew talent, and he recognized something in those twangy, supple backing vocals. Five years after first arriving in California, Larson signed a recording contract with Warner Bros. Records. She would later detail her rapid rise to fame with charming nonchalance:

"You sing a little with somebody backstage, then you sing background on somebody's demo, then somebody lets you sing on an album and pretty soon people are talking about you. Then you go on the road with somebody—Hoyt Axton or Commander Cody—and they let you do a song in the show, and pretty soon people are saying: That girl was good! Then they offer you a record deal."

Larson had the goods, but she also had the right people in her corner. And, most importantly, she had a song from Neil Young. “Lotta Love” dated back to the sessions for American Stars ‘n Bars, where the original had been recorded, discarded, and ultimately forgotten. Larson only discovered the tune after finding a cassette copy lying on the floor of Young’s car.


“I popped it in the tape player and commented on what a great song it was,” she later recalled. “Neil said: ‘You want it? It's yours.’” (It probably helped that her and Young were romantically involved at the time.) “Lotta Love” eventually found its way onto Comes A Time—ironically, one of only two songs on the album without any Nicolette participation—where Young delivered it as a loping country lament, wistful and sparse. Larson’s version made sure to keep the melancholic essence of the original intact. The rest she transformed into a pop masterpiece.


“Lotta Love” might be the last perfect specimen of AM radio grandeur, sun-kissed studio splendor shot through with a potent strand of exquisite ache. It’s the kind of single that finds room for both a haunted, minor-key sax riff and a string arrangement done by the man behind “Ode To Billie Joe,” a recording where the guitars scratch like disco and a flute solo sighs like the end of summer. It’s sadness as aphrodisiac, “Dancing On My Own” through the lens of soft-rock. And most importantly, it finds Larson delivering a truly amazing vocal, tinging every line with a mixture of joy and pain, rapture and resignation. “Lotta Love” is the 45 you play until the grooves disintegrate, a three-minute single you wish could go on forever. I love it irrationally, and completely. (It’s a 10.)


Warner didn’t release “Lotta Love” until a month after the Nicolette album itself, mainly to confirm that Young wouldn’t issue his own, competing single. Once given the go-ahead, Larson’s version broke out immediately, debuting on the Hot 100 on November 25, 1978, on its way to a #8 peak in February of the following year. (The track also topped the Adult Contemporary chart for one week.) For Larson, “Lotta Love” must’ve seemed like a great beginning to a long career. In retrospect, she had already peaked after a single song.


In May, follow-up “Rhumba Girl” stalled out at a disappointing #47; the gently sensual “Give A Little” became a minor “Easy Listening” hit three months later. Nicolette itself peaked at #15 and barely went gold. Looking back, “Lotta Love” was probably an impossible act to follow, but it was also an anomaly, an instantly accessible hit on an album mostly stocked with lovely-but-uncommercial ballads and generic up-tempo tracks. Plus, Larson faced a problem similar to other great backup singers: She blended into the material too well. She needed more songs with the immediacy of “Lotta Love.” She would spend the rest of her career struggling to find them.


With 1979’s In The Nick Of Time, producer Ted Templeman downplayed the country bent of Larson’s debut in favor of a more modern, contemporary sound. That decision made sense in a world where much of Nicolette already felt hopelessly out-of-fashion, barely a year after its release. But the shift into slick, stylized pop didn’t play to Larson’s strengths, and even in the opening moments, she’s already threatening to disappear inside the folds of her own, overstuffed album.


For the first single, Warner chose “Let Me Go, Love,” a tastefully bland slice of adult-rock, scrubbed and manicured within an inch of its life. The production took several cues from the late Seventies work of Templeman’s most famous clients, the Doobie Brothers—not surprising, given that frontman Michael McDonald had co-authored the song. Warner, in their infinite wisdom, decided to double down on the Doobie-ness by adding McDonald’s own vocals into the mix; again, a decision that probably made sense in the wake of his triple-Grammy win for “What A Fool Believes.” The result simply served to make Larson more anonymous than ever.


I’m a little confused as to what, exactly, is going on during “Let Me Go, Love.” Is McDonald providing backup? Is he a guest artist? Is he the lead artist? No one—not Warner, not Templeman, not even Larson herself—seems entirely sure. “Let Me Go, Love” is a strange kind of non-duet, one where each party appears to be deferring to the other at every turn. Larson and McDonald both pull way back, seemingly afraid of overwhelming the track, and thus leaving a gaping personality void where a true lead vocal would normally reside.


“Event” duets were already becoming a strategy by the turn of the decade: Mathis and Williams, Streisand and Diamond, Streisand and Summer. (Babs basically weaponized the event duet from 1978 through 1981.) Michael McDonald wasn’t quite a “name” artist at the time of “Let Me Go, Love,” but I assume he appeared on the single primarily to boost sales. So why didn’t Warner advertise his presence better? McDonald has top-billed “Vocals” credit on the album itself, and he’s retroactively featured on Billboard’s “Chart History” of the song. But at the time of its actual release, “Let Me Go, Love” got promoted as a Larson solo effort (as per the 7” sleeve above), with the Doobies’ lead singer listed only in small print as the song’s co-writer.


Maybe this was weird record company politics, or maybe this was Warner subtly acknowledging that “Let Me Go, Love” fails as a male-female duet for one simple reason: It’s completely genderless. Larson and McDonald never swap lines, nor do they change perspective. Their voices blend beautifully, but they’re also practically indistinguishable from each other. Only the back-and-forth in the last thirty seconds hints at the great soft-rock summit this could’ve been, given the correct approach. (Six years later, a different label would figure out exactly how to use McDonald in proper “event duet” context. That equally bland ballad—which spent three weeks at #1—will eventually appear on this site.)


In a contemporaneous Rolling Stone review, Don Shewey argued that “McDonald’s entrancing vocal... so overshadows Larson’s that she seems to be playing second fiddle rather than sharing the lead.” This isn’t entirely correct, only because no one really takes the lead here. The lack of a strong vocal presence, combined with the dull professionalism of the production, dampens whatever impact the song might otherwise possess. “Let Me Go, Love” is absolutely gorgeous, but it’s a gauzy kind of beauty with no substance underneath; for nearly four minutes, the track simply washes over you, like floating down a river—or, less charitably, going under the Novocain at the dentist’s office.


There’s only one moment in “Let Me Go, Love” that really resonates for me. It arrives at the very end, just before the fade-out. Larson sings, unaccompanied, for the first time in the whole song; just the title phrase, repeated twice. Her initial pass is sweetly hesitant. On the second, she lets her voice trill upward, and that held note—simple, pure, perfect—contains magic. I hear it and my heart breaks: both for the emotion of her delivery, and at the knowledge that Larson ended her Top 40 run largely singing backup on her own single.


Nicolette Larson spent the rest of her twenties in the background of other artists’ hit songs, adding harmonies to Top 10 efforts from Christopher Cross, the Doobie Brothers, and—of course—Linda Ronstadt. (In a weirder connection, she’d also follow in Linda’s footsteps by guesting on a big single from the Dirt Band.) But her own solo records couldn’t find an audience, and Warner dropped her following the release of 1982’s All Dressed Up and No Place To Go. Larson decided to transition into pure country, a decision initially embraced by the Nashville community; in 1984, the Academy of Country Music named her “Best New Female Vocalist” before she’d actually released an album. Yet her time at MCA Nashville turned out to be equally underwhelming, and Larson only landed one Top 40 country hit during her entire tenure with the label. In a depressingly familiar pattern, she split the credit with Steve Wariner.


Aside from a children’s album released in ‘94, Larson basically stopped recording her own music after 1988, but she stayed active in the business—albeit in supporting roles. She toured extensively as a backup vocalist, supporting artists like Jimmy Buffett, Willie Nelson, and the Beach Boys. In 1992, she reunited with Neil Young to sing harmony on Harvest Moon, his biggest-selling album of the last four decades. The following year, Larson finally appeared on MTV for the first time, thanks to Young’s Unplugged special. (As always, she was stuck in the background.) In 1989, she briefly dated “Weird Al” Yankovic, which is awesome and amazing. (Al will appear on this site eventually.) A year later, she tied the knot with Russ Kunkel, longtime drummer for—you guessed it—Linda Ronstadt.


Unfortunately, Larson’s story doesn’t end with a late-career revival, or some well-deserved comeback album. It ends tragically. On December 16, 1997, Nicolette Larson died due to complications arising from cerebral edema, leaving behind her husband and a seven-year-old daughter. She was just 45 years old. Larson exited this world with a reservoir of still-untapped potential, one single-for-the-ages, and a clutch of recordings made better by her presence. Two decades later, her legacy still lingers, not because of hit songs or million-selling records, but something more ethereal: the artistry she inspired in others, the magic she created between the margins, the Eternal Backup Singer who enhanced everything.


GRADE: 4/10


BONUS BITS: In 1988, Larson appeared briefly in the dopey Devito/Schwarzenegger buddy comedy Twins, performing her song “I’d Die For This Dance” during a scene set inside a country honky-tonk. Yes, that’s the legendary Jeff Beck playing guitar in the backing band, and yes, Arnold’s girlfriend is played by Kelly Preston, who passed away less than two weeks ago (as of this writing). Sometimes, life makes even dumb movie clips seem poignant. This is one of those times.


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