On 'Just Like That...,' Bonnie Raitt is a model of continuity
What career artist is shrewder than Bonnie Raitt? She started off the 1970s working in a folk-inflected blues style that had the heft of lineage and contemporary popularity, selecting songs that would hold up well. Patient and persistent, her prime focus was being fully in her element on stage. At the dawn of the '90s, she eased through a much brighter pop spotlight with equanimity, never making us privy to her private turmoils, but prioritizing honesty about where she was in life — a woman of advancing age transcendent in an industry where that fact is often presumed to diminish a performer's value and appeal.
Ever since, she's carried on in the groove that she established — cultivating heat through a deep understanding of mutuality, and its absence, with roadhouse rockers, pop ballads, funky sophistication and plenty else — for an audience that's found it rewarding to keep right on listening.
There's a moment midway through "Blame It On Me," a slow-burning blues number on Just Like That... — Raitt's latest release, out today, and the first album of her 70s — when she makes subtle and supple art of acknowledging the passage of years. "Blame it on time, the fugitive, the vagabond / It's the perfect crime," she challenges a drifting lover, her phrasing both elegantly anguished and knowing. Her voice flares as she tightens her grip around the most powerless line: "Poured like sand through your hands and mine / Blame it on time." Then she shifts her vocalizing to slide guitar, swelling into a melancholy note and mounting an unexpected upward climb. There's no surrendering to nostalgia here — only bracing emotional clarity.
Raitt is a model of continuity; she's been leading the same core band for decades —particularly the rhythm section of
