Linda Ronstadt – Lush Life

About The Song

“Lush Life” serves as the title track and centerpiece of Linda Ronstadt’s album Lush Life, released November 16, 1984, via Asylum Records. It is the second in her trilogy of jazz standards albums arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle, following What’s New (1983) and preceding For Sentimental Reasons (1986). Produced by Peter Asher at The Complex in Los Angeles, the song runs 4:22 and features Riddle’s lush, orchestral arrangement—soft muted horns, sweeping strings, and subtle piano—that creates an intimate, cinematic backdrop for Ronstadt’s warm, nuanced vocal.
Written by Billy Strayhorn between 1933 and 1936, the jazz standard had been recorded by many artists, but Ronstadt’s version became one of its most widely heard interpretations in the 1980s. Riddle’s arrangement, one of his final major works before his death in 1985, earned him a posthumous Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying a Vocal. Ronstadt herself received a nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for her rendition.
The lyrics paint a world-weary portrait of the “lush life”—the glamorous yet empty world of nightclubs, cocktails, and fleeting romances. The narrator reflects on wasted nights spent in “come-what-may places” with “sad and sullen gray faces,” admitting the toll of a failed love affair: “I used to visit all the very gay places / Those come-what-may places / Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life.” The song moves from elegant detachment to quiet despair, with lines like “Life is lonely again / And only last year everything seemed so sure” capturing the emotional unraveling beneath the sophisticated surface. Ronstadt delivers the complex melody with restraint and emotional depth, letting Riddle’s orchestration carry the melancholy without overpowering her phrasing.
Though never released as a commercial single, the track gained exposure through the album’s strong performance. Lush Life peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard 200, No. 8 on the Jazz Albums chart, and earned platinum certification—Ronstadt’s tenth platinum album. The recording package itself won a Grammy for Best Recording Package. The song has appeared on compilations and reissues of the album, remaining a standout for its sophisticated blend of jazz ballad tradition and 1980s orchestral polish.

Video

Lyric

I used to visit all the very gay places
Those come what may places
Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life
To get the feel of life from jazz and cocktails

The girls I knew had sad and sullen grey faces
With distingue traces
That used to be there you could see where they’d been washed away
By too many through the day twelve o’clock tales

Then you came along with your siren song
To tempt me to madness
I thought for a while that your poignant smile
Was tinged with the sadness of a great love for me
Ah yes I was wrong, again I was wrong

Life is lonely again
And only last year everything seemed so sure
Now life is awful again
A trough full of hearts could only be a bore
A week in Paris could ease the bite of it
All I care is to smile in spite of it

I’ll forget you, I will
While yet you are still burning inside my brain
Romance is mush, stifling those who strive
So I’ll live a lush life in some small dive
And there I’ll be
While I rot
With the rest of those whose lives are lonely too