Hasten Down the Wind

Hasten Down the Wind is the seventh studio album by American singer Linda Ronstadt, released by Capitol on August 9, 1976. Becoming her third straight million-selling album, Ronstadt was the first female artist to accomplish this feat.^[6] A critical and commercial success, Hasten garnered her second Grammy Award for Pop Vocal Performance, Female at the 19th Grammy Awards ceremony (1977). It represented a slight departure from her previous albums Heart Like a Wheel (1974) and Prisoner in Disguise (1975) in that she chose to showcase new songwriters over the traditional country rock sound she had been producing up to that point. A more serious and poignant album than its predecessors, it won critical acclaim.^{[citation needed]}

Hasten Down the Wind contained two major hit singles: Ronstadt's covers of Buddy Holly's "That'll Be the Day" (US Pop #11, Country #27) and her reworking of the late Patsy Cline's 1961 hit, "Crazy", reaching #6 on the US Country chart in early 1977.^[7]

The album showcased songs from artists such as Warren Zevon ("Hasten Down the Wind") and Karla Bonoff ("Someone to Lay Down Beside Me", US #42, Easy Listening #38), both of whom would soon be making a name for themselves in the singer-songwriter world. The album included a cover of a cover: "The Tattler" by Washington Phillips, which Ry Cooder had re-arranged for his 1974 album Paradise and Lunch. The album also included two songs co-written by Ronstadt, including one in Spanish (her first recorded foray into Spanish music, more than a decade before she released her first fully-Spanish album).

Her third album to go platinum, Hasten Down the Wind spent several weeks in the top three of the Billboard album charts. It was also the second of four number 1 Country albums for her.^{[citation needed]}