Blues icon Bonnie Raitt on 50 years as a singer, songwriter and guitar hero
After 50 years as a recording artist, Bonnie Raitt knows that inspiration can strike at any time, so long as she keeps her heart and mind open.
Bonnie Raitt had begged for it, and on Christmas Day, the eight-year-old opened her gifts to find exactly what she wanted: a Stella guitar. Already a budding pianist, she was keen to learn a new skill, and when her grandfather showed her three chords on her acoustic six-string, he also gave her the keys to a life in music.
The child became devoted to the instrument and had a good ear, so she learned to play from records, lifting and dropping the needle time and time again while attempting to mimic what she heard when folk artists such as Joan Baez, Odetta Holmes and Woody Guthrie fingered their fretboards.
Other than those three precious chords her grandfather demonstrated – C, G and F – Raitt had never seen another player in the flesh, which is why she developed a finger-picking style that included unorthodox chord shapes.
When she fell in love with slide guitar a few years later, it was a similar story: with no visual reference point, the child took to soaking the label off a cold medicine bottle, putting it on her middle finger, finding an open tuning on her guitar and hammering away at the sound until she was playing something similar to what she heard coming through the speakers.
“From my generation of folk music, I got the bug,” Raitt tells Review. “There’s just something about being so physically connected to an instrument that resonates in your gut: you’re playing, and the wood in the soundboard really comes right through your body. It’s just so expressive, and so portable: that’s why people have dragged guitars on their backs for camping trips all around the world.”
“I never took lessons, but I got what I needed just from accompanying the songs that I would learn and play in my room,” she says. “I never had any desire to be a professional. I just really wanted to entertain myself.”
But the bug bit hard, and a professional she became: although Raitt was one of few prominent women guitarists in American music when she began recording and performing in 1972, she has now sustained an acclaimed career as a blues singer, songwriter and player across five decades.
During that time, she has entertained millions more than just herself. She has racked up plaudits including 10 Grammy Awards, while Rolling Stone magazine included her in its lists of the 100 greatest singers and 100 greatest guitarists of all time – a rare double.
In turn, she has inspired plenty of musicians to invest their time in learning to play guitar, and she glows when Review mentions this notion of passing artistic motivation between generations.
“That makes me feel fantastic – especially helping women know they can be lead guitar players,” she says. “You put in a lot of time in the beginning, and get the jones for learning and practising, and then you just get to have so much fun with it.
“If they pick up on that, and are inspired to play, and kick some butt and do this for their own enjoyment – or trying to do it for a career – I’m very, very proud.”
After 50 years in the public eye with her hands wrapped around various guitars, electric and acoustic, what does Raitt see when she looks at her instruments today, aged 72?
“Oh, I have great affection and respect for them, because I look at my stage, I look out at the audience and realise that I’m just wiggling my fingers on this piece of wood and people pay to see me, and let me do this for a living,” she says with a laugh.
“I’m supporting all these people and making this (concert) happen, just from putting air through the little few inches of my throat and wiggling my fingers on a piece of wood,” she says.
“To me, it has never been lost – the miracle of how much power, soul and expression can come out of the act of a human being playing the guitar.”
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Her 21st album and first release in six years, titled Just Like That …, is a striking collection that melds blues, rock and folk songs. The whole set sings, but its true highlights belong to Raitt’s four outstanding originals, which were drawn from a blend of life experiences and moving stories she first heard about through the mass media.
In a long phone conversation from her home in Marin County, near San Francisco, the songwriter unpacks two of these new creations in detail. The title track took shape a few years ago when Raitt was watching the evening news bulletin, which concluded with a human interest story centred on a woman who was about to meet an organ donor recipient. The organ in question? Her dead son’s heart.
“Of course, my ears pricked up: I love a good tear-jerking story, and that seemed very emotional and beautiful,” Raitt recalls. She watched as the film crew followed this woman into a man’s house, and they sat on the couch discussing her gracious decision to donate her son’s heart to save the life of another.
“And he turned to her and said, ‘Would you like to put your head on my chest and hear your son’s heart?’” the musician recalls, her voice briefly faltering with emotion. “I still can’t even talk about it without breaking up. It was one of the most moving moments I have experienced.”
Sitting in front of the television screen, Raitt’s own heart was wide open, weeping at this pure exchange of life and love enabled by medical science.
Her creative mind got to work, fleshing out a short, fictional character sketch rooted in the truth of that news story she had happened to see that night.
For Just Like That …, she imagined a woman whose life had been ruined by the thought she had accidentally killed her son, and a grateful man who had spent his additional years trying to track her down to thank her for this most precious gift.
In the space of five minutes and five expertly crafted verses, Raitt and her band – bassist James Hutchinson, drummer Ricky Fataar, organist Glenn Patscha and guitarist Kenny Greenberg – capture this remarkable tale, set it to music and send it out into the ether, one more beautiful song in a world filled with countless possibilities:
And just like that your life can change
Look what the angels send
I lay my head upon his chest
And I was with my boy again
I spent so long in darkness,
Never thought the night would end
But somehow grace has found me
And I had to let him in.
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In May 2018, Raitt was reading The New York Times Magazine when she came across an article about a prison hospice program in California. Written by Suleika Jaouad and photographed by Katy Grannan, the story detailed the experience of prisoners caring for their fellow inmates by offering end-of-life care, grooming and companionship. “I was so incredibly moved at the decision that these people made to be of service at this point,” Raitt recalls.
“They’re stuck in there; they might as well do something out of love, and look at the transformation that they must have gone through, not only to be a volunteer, but to be in that process of being with somebody when they are at the end of their life, and helpless.”
“I just thought it was such an incredible testament to the power of the human spirit to overcome all kinds of traumatic childhood stress, anger, hatred and separation, and be redeemed,” she says.
“I couldn’t think of a better idea to write a song about, so I made up a story and climbed into a character that I created.”
Unlike the title track, Down The Hall is sparsely arranged, containing only Raitt’s voice, her finger-picked acoustic guitar and Patscha’s gentle Hammond organ, as she sings from the imagined perspective of a man in prison:
The thought of those guys goin’ out alone
It hit me somewhere deep
I asked could I go sit with ‘em
For some comfort and relief?
Next thing you know, I’m on the ward
Doin’ things you can’t believe
Like shaving Julio’s bony head
Crackin’ him up when I wash his feet.
In addition to writing a song about what she describes as one of the most powerful stories she has heard, Raitt began researching similar prison hospice programs. She found there were about 75 operating across the United States, and a portion of the proceeds from her 21st album will be donated to the organisations that run them.
Both of these songs – Just Like That... and Down The Hall – were captured in one or two takes, owing to the extreme emotion Raitt felt while performing the words she had written. This experience contained echoes of the recording of Raitt’s biggest hit, the 1991 single I Can’t Make You Love Me.
Written by Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin, the song sees Raitt sing from the perspective of someone experiencing unrequited, one-sided love. Later covered by the likes of George Michael, Adele and Prince – as well as Australian musician Ian Moss for Review’s Isolation Room video series in 2020 – it is a song of excruciating honesty laid bare. As with these two most recent songs, Raitt was only able to sing it once, in a single take.
“I Can’t Make You Love Me was hard to sing in the studio because I’ve been on both sides of it,” she says. “It’s very vivid to me, what it felt like to have to hurt someone, tell them I didn’t love them anymore – and I’ve also been left, and had someone tell me they no longer love me anymore.”
Asked whether she’ll be able to keep her emotions in check to perform these deeply felt new songs, ripped straight out of the pages of peoples’ real lives, Raitt admits it’ll be a challenge.
“The songs mean different things over different decades, but what happens when you’re on stage is a very…” She pauses, then says, “I don’t want to put too much of a spiritual spin on it, but you just give it up. You dig as deep as you possibly can, and mean it as deeply as you can. Every song. I know that when I sing this for people, it will move me – but I know they’ll be moved as well, and together, we’ll get through it.”
For Raitt, her newest album started when she had those two experiences of seeing stories that prompted her to pick up the pen in an act of empathy.
“When I finished the last line of both of them, I just had goosebumps all the way up and down; I felt like I’d been hit by some kind of lightning,” she says. “Because I hadn’t written a song in so long, and it was really special to want to do it, and want to honour what I was writing about.”
“And then have it work? It’s a tremendous gift,” she says. “Even if I never played it for anybody, at least I felt proud.”
Having inspired budding musicians to pick up the guitar and sing for five decades and counting, Raitt has tended to opt for quality over quantity in her own songwriting. But by waiting patiently, and by staying open to stories that cut to the core of human experience, she continues to show how artistic inspiration can strike at any time, just like that.
Just Like That… is released on April 22 via Redwing Records. Bonnie Raitt plans to tour Australia in 2023.
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