For Ronstadt, being a rock star was something of an out-of-body experience. She was marketed as “this sexualised being, somebody else’s version of me walking around with my name”, she says, “I had to put out the complete version of who I was.”

She moved back to Tucson, adopting two children—Mary Clementine, now 17, and Carlos, now 14. She never married. “I’m very bad at compromise, and there’s a lot of compromise in marriage,” she says. In Tucson, she had hoped to give her children a life resembling her own, in which boys and girls rode ponies to the drugstore to buy a Coke. But that Tucson is long gone now. So she moved back to her old neighbourhood in San Francisco, where she had lived during much of the ’80s.

She continues to be involved in humanitarian groups like the Samaritan Patrol along the border in her beloved Sonoran Desert, where she cleans feet and applies bandages. Even as she plans six shows this year and a new album with Savoy, Ronstadt spins ideas about green building workshops, sustainable agriculture and a little eco-Mexico with organic green onions and fresh juices Michoacan.

“I’m not as single-mindedly focussed on music,” she said. “I’m really focused on how do you stop erosion.”

Patricia Leigh BrownNYT