The classic album Bonnie Raitt refuses to repeat: “What I have to do”
Every great rock and roll song is about forward momentum half the time. It’s awfully good to have a song in the charts for the moment, but what separates the true legends from the aspiring artists is being able to keep that momentum going for a while, so everyone knows that you deserve to be at the top of the charts. But that’s also how the marketing team expects people to act, and Bonnie Raitt never exactly cared for the kind of records the label was interested in making.
Throughout her career, Raitt has made her living through interpreting the best songs she could and not caring what anyone else said. She was far from punk rock in that respect, but listening to her tunes, it’s far more interesting to see her follow her muse trying to be the best bluesy guitarist that anyone could have asked for rather than putting out tunes like ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ all over again.
Then again, those ballads seem to work for a damn good reason. The blues never catered to those kinds of drippy storytelling songs, but whenever they were in Raitt’s hands, she could often translate them into some of the greatest pieces of musical emotion that anyone had ever heard. And that only came from following in the footsteps of the blues legends like Skip James who came before her.
But for fans, it would always come back to albums like Give It Up, and Raitt knew better than giving in to what the public wanted all the time, saying, “People ask, ‘Why can’t you do another one like Give It Up?’ which they seem to like the most. If I do, that’s all it will be – a repeat! I think what I’m doing now is what I have to, make the styles from those older blues people into my own. It may not be a three-chord blues song; maybe you can’t classify it now.”
Fans might like when their music is put in neat little boxes, but Raitt not defining herself to one genre has been what’s made her tunes so exciting over the years. There’s often a bluesy character laced throughout her tunes, but there’s also a fair bit of R&B, a touch of folk music, and the odd adult contemporary track that finds its way onto the track listing. But if you listen to her voice, that’s where the blues comes in as well.
In fact, it’s a lot similar to the kind of approach that Tina Turner made in the 1980s. ‘The Queen of Rock and Roll’ may have been smothered in keyboards and 1980s textures when making some of her later hits like ‘Private Dancer’ and ‘You Better Be Good To Me’, but as soon as she opened her mouth to sing, there was no doubt that she turned every one of her tunes into rock and roll songs.
And it’s not like Raitt completely forgot how to strike that balance that Give It Up had. Many of her later projects, like Nick of Time, were perfectly eclectic for what they were, but it was a lot easier for her to work in different mediums rather than try to copy from the same playbook over and over again.
That kind of mentality is reserved for the artists who play it safe too often, but since none of the blues guitarists made their living copying someone else’s style, why should Raitt be the one to start? After all, the blues has always been about finding one’s own voice in the music, and even though she had an identifiable sound, she would rather stand by the records she was making than reminisce every time she went into the studio.
