Sometimes a great song has to travel a little before the world catches up.
When Linda Ronstadt released “Faithless Love” on her landmark 1974 album Heart Like a Wheel, the aching country ballad already had everything a classic needed: a beautiful melody, an unforgettable chorus and lyrics by J.D. Souther that distilled the disappointment of a dying relationship into something almost painfully simple.
It just wasn’t a hit. At least not yet.
Souther wrote “Faithless Love” during a period when he and Ronstadt were both part of the extraordinarily fertile Southern California music scene that also produced the Eagles and Jackson Browne. Ronstadt and Souther had been romantically involved, and one night at two or three in the morning, Souther was working on the song in the piano room of their apartment when he accidentally woke her.
“I told her I thought it was gonna be a really great song but it’s kind of hopeless,” Souther recalled in an interview with The Huffington Post. “I had a modulation going into the bridge and one coming right out of it and it seemed too crazy and I didn’t think it was gonna work. She said that she thought it was beautiful and she wanted to sing it.”
And she did.
Ronstadt became the first artist to release “Faithless Love,” including it on Heart Like a Wheel in November 1974. Souther played acoustic guitar and sang harmony on the recording, his voice winding around Ronstadt’s as she sings of a love that inevitably disappears, leaving heartbreak behind.
Introducing the song one night in 1977 to an audience of adoring fans, Ronstadt referred to J.D. Souther as “my favorite songwriter, and one of my favorite singers” before launching into a flawless performance.
Critics noticed. Rolling Stone singled out “Faithless Love” in its contemporary review of the album, calling it perhaps Souther’s strongest ballad to that point and praising his harmony vocal. Heart Like a Wheel went on to become Ronstadt’s commercial breakthrough, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and eventually earning a place in the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Souther finally released his own beautifully restrained version of “Faithless Love” on his 1976 album Black Rose. But it would take another eight years, and another great voice, for the song itself to break through on radio.
In 1984, Glen Campbell wasn’t an emerging artist—he was a superstar whose career had lost considerable momentum, surrounded by recent controversy and trying to regain traction on country radio. The extraordinary run of hits that had made him one of the biggest stars of the late 1960s and 70s had slowed considerably, and he hadn’t scored a Top 10 country hit in three years.
For Letter to Home, his second album for Atlantic Records, Campbell made a significant change: He headed to Nashville and teamed with producer Harold Shedd to embark on their first full-length recording. Together, they reached back a decade for Souther’s “Faithless Love,” a song already familiar through Ronstadt’s and Souther’s recordings but one that had never been a hit single.
It turns out the song needed Campbell just as Campbell, at that particular career moment, needed the right song. Released as the lead single, the tastefully arranged cover finally gave “Faithless Love” its radio breakthrough and gave Campbell his first Top 10 country hit in three years.
Years later, Souther mused on the unusual history of the song, noting that many listeners came to remember Ronstadt’s recording as the hit, even though hers had never been released as a single.
“Glen is a great singer and it was a completely different market and came out a reasonable amount of time after the other version. It was even nominated for a Grammy. He really made it a big record,” he said. “The funny thing is the public memory seems to be that the hit came from Linda’s version in the same way that people thought that ‘Desperado’ was a hit for The Eagles, which just wasn’t the case.”
That may be the more interesting measure of “Faithless Love.”
Ronstadt introduced it. Souther gave it his own voice. Campbell gave it its radio breakthrough. And somewhere along the way, the song became bigger than any one recording of it.
As Souther understood particularly well, sometimes a hit is made by the charts.
And sometimes listeners make one over time.
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