By Classic Oldies 
It Doesn’t Matter Anymore sounds like acceptance on the surface, but in Linda Ronstadt’s hands it becomes a tender, almost trembling portrait of heartbreak that still lingers long after the last line fades.
There are songs that arrive like declarations, and there are songs that arrive like memories. “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore”, as sung by Linda Ronstadt, belongs to the second kind. Released on her landmark 1974 album Heart Like a Wheel, the performance did not storm the charts as a headline single of its own, but it became part of an album that reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and helped define one of the most emotionally resonant voices in American popular music. In that setting, the song felt less like a cover and more like a private reckoning placed gently in the middle of a classic record.
The song itself already carried history before Ronstadt ever touched it. Written by Paul Anka for Buddy Holly, “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” was recorded in 1958 and released in 1959, after Holly’s passing. That fact alone gave the song a shadow that listeners could never quite ignore. It reached No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States and climbed to No. 1 in the United Kingdom, becoming one of the defining posthumous releases of the rock-and-roll era. Yet even with that history, the song was never only about biography. Its real strength lay in its emotional contradiction: the title insists on indifference, while the melody quietly reveals the exact opposite.
That contradiction is precisely what made it such an ideal song for Linda Ronstadt. Few singers have ever been so gifted at inhabiting a lyric without overexplaining it. On Heart Like a Wheel, she approaches “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” with remarkable restraint. She does not turn it into melodrama. She does not push for grand heartbreak. Instead, she allows the song to ache in smaller, more human ways. Her phrasing suggests someone trying to sound calm while still carrying the sting of what cannot be undone. That emotional balance is what gives the performance its staying power.
By the time Heart Like a Wheel appeared in late 1974, Ronstadt was moving into a new artistic phase. She had already earned admiration, but this album changed the scale of her career. With major performances such as “You’re No Good”, which became a No. 1 pop hit, and “When Will I Be Loved”, which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, the album showed her brilliance in full view. Yet one reason the record lasts is that it never relied only on its best-known singles. Album cuts like “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” gave the project emotional depth, revealing her instinct for songs with history, vulnerability, and quiet devastation.
What makes her version especially moving is the way it bridges musical eras. The original Buddy Holly recording belongs to the late 1950s, a moment when pop songs often carried their heartbreak with elegance and brevity. Linda Ronstadt, recording in the mid-1970s, brought a different sensibility: richer vocal shading, a more open sense of longing, and the subtle influence of country-rock’s emotional directness. She never erases the song’s earlier identity. Instead, she honors it while drawing out a sadness that feels even more intimate. It is a fine example of what great interpreters do: they preserve the bones of a song while revealing a different soul inside it.
Lyrically, “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” is built on one of the oldest emotional defenses in popular song: the claim that the damage is done and the speaker has moved on. But that claim is fragile from the very beginning. The words say one thing, the feeling says another. In lesser hands, that tension can be flattened into simple sadness. In Ronstadt’s performance, it remains unresolved. That is why the song feels truthful. Real heartbreak is rarely theatrical. More often, it sounds like someone trying to tidy up a wound with a few calm sentences, only to reveal—through tone, pause, and breath—that it still hurts terribly.
There is also something deeply characteristic about her choice to record it. Linda Ronstadt always had an uncanny ear for material that carried emotional memory. Whether she was singing rock, country, folk, or standards, she had the rare ability to make an old song feel personally discovered rather than merely inherited. On Heart Like a Wheel, that gift is everywhere. But in “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore”, it becomes especially clear. She takes a song many listeners associated with Buddy Holly and reintroduces it not as nostalgia for its own sake, but as a living piece of emotional truth.
That may be the deepest meaning of the song in her catalog. It is not simply a cover of a classic composition. It is a reminder that heartbreak changes shape as songs move from one generation to another. A line written in the 1950s can still land with startling force in the 1970s, and still sound freshly wounded decades later. Linda Ronstadt understood that great songs are not museum pieces. They wait for the right voice, the right mood, the right hour in a listener’s life.
And so “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” remains one of those quieter treasures in the Linda Ronstadt story. Not the loudest. Not the most celebrated. But perhaps one of the most revealing. In a voice full of grace, poise, and sorrow held just below the surface, she turns a familiar farewell into something lasting. The title may insist that the feeling has passed. Her singing tells us, with exquisite honesty, that some goodbyes never quite do.