Awards

Bonnie Raitt Essentials: 11 Songs That Showcase The Breadth And Depth Of The 2023 GRAMMYs Song Of The Year Winner

on February 9, 2023 No comments
by David McPherson

Following Bonnie Raitt’s big night at the 2023 GRAMMYs — where she won three golden gramophones, including the coveted Song Of The Year — GRAMMY.com looks at 11 tracks that showcase the blues icon’s talent.

When first lady Dr. Jill Biden announced the GRAMMY winner for Song of the Year at the 2023 GRAMMYs, attendees exchanged surprised looks throughout the Crypto.com arena — even winner Bonnie Raitt included. 

“I’m so surprised, I don’t know what to say,” Raitt said as she took the podium, her hand over her face. After all, her song “Just Like That” beat compositions written by such modern pop stars as Taylor Swift, Lizzo, Harry Styles, Adele, and Beyoncé

A day later, with three more GRAMMYS in her collection (Raitt also won golden gramophones for Best Americana Roots Song and Best Americana Performance that night) that now totals a lucky 13, the singer was still reeling. The reality? This win was no fluke. It affirmed what longtime fans, critics and many behind-the-scenes already knew; Raitt is the real deal. The significance of this win — and what made it truly special — is it was the artists’ first GRAMMY in the Song Of The Year category.    

For more than 50 years, Raitt, 73, has been making records and following her passion. The blues maven is a modern trailblazer — and bandleader — in a genre men traditionally dominate. A 10-time GRAMMY winner and 30-time nominee before this year’s awards, Raitt’s career was already legendary. Not a bad legacy for someone who did not want stardom and did it her way.

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Raitt grew up in Los Angeles to parents who both worked in the arts; her dad was a Broadway star and her mom a pianist. Later, she headed east to attend Harvard where she majored in Social Relations and African Studies. Here she met promoter Dick Waterman, who introduced her to the famed Delta Blues singer Son House. During her college days, a worn vinyl copy of Blues at Newport served as her education outside the classroom; Raitt honed her sound playing the coffee houses and folk clubs in the New England area. At 21 years old, she signed a record deal with Warner Bros., and in 1971 released her self-titled debut to critical acclaim. Eight albums followed in the 1970s alone.

Mainstream success — and her first GRAMMYs — came in 1989 with Nick of Time. The record, which just last year the Library of Congress added to its National Recording Registry, won three golden gramophones: Album Of The Year, Best Rock Vocal Performance, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Three decades later, her latest GRAMMY victories solidify her place as a timeless music legend. 

In honor of Raitt’s big night at the 65th GRAMMY Awards, here are 11 Essential songs from the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer — a mix of originals, covers, deep cuts and duets.

“Thank You,” Bonnie Raitt (1971)

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One of two originals Raitt penned on her self-titled debut. (The other was “Finest Lovin’ Man.”) The rest of the record was mostly covers: folk, rock and blues artists Raitt admired. This piano ballad is an early indication of Raitt’s talent to pen a song that lingers long.

“Nothing Seems to Matter,” Give it Up (1972)

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Recorded at Bearsville Studio in New York, Raitt’s second album showcased more original songs (three of the 10 are self-penned) from the maturing artist whose confidence was growing. “Nothing Seems to Matter” is one of the best. With the singer’s soothing vocals, finger-picking and backed by rich orchestration, Raitt tugs at your heartstrings with this universal love song.

“Angel From Montgomery,” Streetlights (1974)

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Written by her good friend John Prine — who she toured with regularly early in her career, which forged a lifelong friendship — this signature song about longing to escape an unsatisfactory life almost became more famous for Raitt than Prine’s original that appeared on his 1971 self-titled debut. The tune is a fan favorite and one Raitt has stated is one of the most important songs she has ever recorded. Her version adds a gospel feel to Prine’s storied song.

“That Song About the Midway,” Streetlights (1974)

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Another stunning reimagination, this gorgeous Joni Mitchell song — from the nine-time GRAMMY-winner’s Clouds — was the opening track on Raitt’s 1974 album Streetlights. The blues singer’s version drips with soul. She takes this storied song (inspired by Mitchell meeting Leonard Cohen at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival) and gives this folk masterpiece a new spirit — injecting it with a full band sound that makes Raitt’s version almost outshine the original.

“Nick of Time,” Nick of Time (1989)

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The title track from Raitt’s commercial comeback and debut with Capitol Records in 1989 is a rumination on aging and the brevity of time. Inspiration came from deep conversations with friends and observations of her own parents getting older (“I see my folks are getting on and I watch their bodies change.”) Raitt wrote the bulk of the song during a weeklong retreat in a cabin in Mendocino, California. The resulting mid-tempo ballad — with undertones of the blues — is one of the most endearing compositions Raitt has ever written: relatable and honest. The song was a Top 10 hit on the Adult Contemporary charts and won a GRAMMY for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

“Thing Called Love,” Nick of Time (1989)

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Raitt took this John Hiatt-penned song — two years after he released it himself — and, like so many other originals before (and after) made it her own. What makes the blues-rocker’s version unique is the live-off-the-floor feel of a small band jamming in a club; yet, the resulting sound is much bigger. Raitt was helped by the engineering prowess of the late great Ed Cherney, who won a GRAMMY for his work on this record. Her rendition resulted in another hit from Nick of Time, landing at No. 11 on Billboard’s Rock charts. The video, starring Dennis Quaid, also helped to ingrain this song into the pop culture canon of the late 1980s.

“I’m in the Mood,” The Healer (1990)

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Taken from John Lee Hooker‘s 1990 album The Healer, this duet with the blues legend won the pair a GRAMMY the following year for Best Traditional Blues Performance. Hooker was one of Raitt’s heroes; it was a full-circle moment getting the opportunity to record this classic 38 years after it was first a hit.

“Something to Talk About,” Luck of the Draw (1991)

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From the seven-times platinum Luck of the Draw, this catchy hit song was written by Canadian Shirley Eikhard seven years before it eventually resonated with Raitt on a demo tape Eikhard sent the singer. The hooky track served Raitt’s soulful voice seamlessly, creating a combination that resulted in her biggest chart feat to date, landing at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song also took home the GRAMMY for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1992, and more than three decades later it remains Raitt’s top-selling song — eclipsing more than seven million in sales in the U.S. alone.

“I Can’t Make You Love Me” Luck of the Draw (1991)

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Raitt followed her biggest pop hit with what would become her biggest ballad. Although Raitt didn’t write the sorrowful piano track, her pained-yet-poised delivery is as poignant as the song’s narrative of unrequited love. The song proved so moving that it has been covered by George Michael, Bon Iver, Boyz II Men and Adele, the latter of whom called it “just perfect in every single way,” and touted Raitt’s “stunning” voice. Now Raitt’s most-streamed song — and a GRAMMY Hall of Fame inductee — “I Can’t Make You Love Me” serves as a testament to Raitt’s ability to capture feeling whether or not she’s behind the pen.

“Gnawin’ On It,” Silver Lining (2002)

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Raitt co-wrote this gritty, raw slide-guitar song that oozes so much soul with blues guitarist Roy Rogers, who was named after the famed singing cowboy. (Raitt learned her slide style from one of the masters: “Mississippi” Fred McDowell.) This performance from her 2002 Austin City Limits appearance showcases Raitt’s down-and-dirty vocals, the interplay between two guitar greats and features plenty of memorable riffs. More than 20 years since this performance was captured, it is still a joy to behold.

Bonnie Raitt accepts the award for song of the year for “Just Like That” at the 65th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 5, 2023, in Los Angeles. © Chris Pizzello /AP Photo

“Just Like That,” Just Like That (2022)

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“Just like that your life can change,” Raitt softly sings in this title cut from her 2022 album. Inspired by an emotive news story Raitt saw, the narrative tells of a woman who donated her late son’s heart, and years later met the organ’s recipient. With gentle finger-picking providing the melody, Raitt relates this heartwarming tale that echoes the mastery of her mentor and dear departed friend John Prine.

Though Raitt has generated several hits by reimagining other’s songs, “Just Like That” — which she wrote on her own — shows that her own tales are just as powerful and timeless. While her Song Of The Year win may have been shocking to some, Raitt’s recent GRAMMY win confirms the septuagenarian still has something to talk about — and the world is still listening.

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Source: © Copyright The Grammy Awards

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Bonnie Raitt’s keyboardist a ‘fierce defender and fan of Winnipeg’

on February 8, 2023 No comments
WINNIPEG

by Danton Unger

Music has taken a Winnipeg-born keyboardist on a path stretching from New Orleans to New York and onto the stage with Grammy Award-winning artist Bonnie Raitt, but he has never forgotten his roots.

A proud Winnipegger – that is how Glenn Patscha describes himself while thinking back to his early memories in the city.

“I’m so proud that I came from Winnipeg, and I’m a fierce defender and fan of Winnipeg,” he told CTV News.

Patscha’s career started when he was a kid learning piano and playing in cover bands in Winnipeg where he was born and raised. In 1989 when he was 18, Patscha moved to New Orleans to study jazz on a scholarship with Ellis Marsalis.

From New Orleans to New York and eventually to Nova Scotia where he now lives, Patscha has been performing and recording with his own bands along with dozens of artists including The Holmes Brothers, Roger Waters, Willie Nelson and Rosanne Cash.

He can now add Bonnie Raitt to the list.

While playing with Marc Cohn (whom he still tours with), Patscha said they opened for the American blues icon and got along with her very well. In 2018, Raitt gave him a call and he has been working with her ever since, joining her band as a vocalist and keyboardist.

“I’ve always been a fan, so it was just kind of a natural fit,” Patscha said. “(Raitt) has had some of the greatest keyboardists there are playing with her, so it’s an honour to kind of be in that chair.”

Regardless of where his musical path has taken him, Patscha has kept his Winnipeg roots close.

“My earliest life was in Winnipeg. That all seems like a long time ago, but I still call it home,” he said.

It is a hometown pride bolstered by Raitt’s win at the Grammys on Sunday for Best Americana Performance with ‘Made Up Mind‘ – a cover originally written and released by Winnipeg’s own Dave and Joey Landreth of The Bros. Landreth.

“I remember the first time I heard those guys as well and it just knocked me out,” Patscha said. “They’re not just a great band from Winnipeg, they’re one of the greatest bands there is.”

Patscha said the song has since become a regular show opener for Raitt and the rest of the band, and has quickly become a recognizable part of her repertoire.

‘Made Up Mind’ is included on her twenty-first album ‘Just Like That‘ – the title track of which also netted her the Grammys songwriter’s award for Song of the Year and Best American Roots Song.

To see Raitt’s work recognized at the Grammys over the weekend was an exciting moment for Patscha.

“I’m very kind of careful about the work that I choose, and I’m proud of most of it – I’m particularly proud of the work with Bonnie,” he said.

“She’s such a giant figure in the history of so many genres and has had such a long career, and to be even a small part of that is, as a fan, is an honour.”

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Source: © Copyright CTV News Winnipeg

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Media Backlash to Bonnie Raitt’s Grammy Success
There has been a mixed media reaction to Bonnie Raitt's Song of the Year Grammy

on February 7, 2023 No comments
by Paul Cutler

Bonnie Raitt’s shock win in the prestigious Song of the Year category at the 65th Grammy Award, for “Just Like That,” was for many the triumph of the seemingly-lost art of crafted song-writing which reflects the trials and tribulations of ordinary life.

For others, particularly in the mainstream music industry, it was plain treachery

Rolling Stone magazine was among the first to react to the shock choice under a headline many might deem offensive: “WTF: Bonnie Raitt Wins Song of the Year”.

It began, somewhat condescendingly: “To be very clear, Bonnie Raitt is an absolute legend. “Just Like That” is a stellar song, and it’s amazing that she became the first woman over 50 to win Song of the Year in Grammy history.”

Rolling Stone, under a generic by-line, then opined: “That said, giving her the award over wildly popular future classics by Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce, and the other nominees was a typical Grammy blunder, and one most likely fueled (sic) by name recognition for older Grammy voters.”

It added: “We thought the Grammys had moved beyond such bizarrely out-of-touch choices, but apparently not.”

Esquire deemed Bonnie’s win the “chaos vote.” Dave Holmes added: “It was already a weird night long before ol’ Bonnie swiped Song of the Year from Harry Styles’s “As It Was” and Beyonce’s “Break My Soul” with “Just Like That,” a song nobody had heard until sometime this morning, leaving us to wonder whether the win was a sort of lifetime-achievement situation for a longtime Grammy favourite, or just an expression of support for the Sex and the City reboot.”

Other perspectives were somewhat kinder.

The New York Times reaction came under the headline “Best Graceful Shocked Reaction: Bonnie Raitt.” Pop critic Jon Pareles commented: “She is one of the mature singers and songwriters who have been relegated to formats like “Americana” and “Legacy.” But Raitt has learned from the best – notably John Prine – how to tell a sad but uplifting story with a voice and a small band. Some proportion of Grammy voters – enough to lift her into a plurality above Beyonce and Adele – obviously recognised the combination of passion and terse craftsmanship.”

In Pitchfork, Sam Sodomsky continued this theme: “Inspired by empathetic story-telling of John Prine, it’s a simple song that surges with genuine emotion, human connection and the beauty of the unexpected. Fittingly, Raitt’s win for Song of the Year embraces those same qualities as she thanked the audience with visible surprise and a hard-won sense of gratitude.”

Indeed, in a most sincere acceptance speech, Raitt invoked the memory and work of her late friend John Prine, who died of COVID complications in 2020. She said: “People have been responding to the song, partly because of how much I love – and we all love – John Prine, and that was the inspiration for the music for this song and telling a story from the inside.”

Like many Prine songs, particularly in his early years, Raitt was driven to write “Just Like That” while reflecting on a real-life event which moved her emotionally.

In an interview with The New York Times prior to the Grammys, Raitt detailed how the slow, endearing “Just Like That” came to her: “And completely out of the blue, I saw this news program. They followed this woman with a film crew to the guy’s house who received her son’s heart. There was a lump in my throat – it was very emotional.”

She added: “And when he asked her to sit down next to him and asked if she’d like to put her head on his chest and listen to his heart – I can’t even tell the story to this day without choking up, because it was so moving to me.”

She translates the story to lyrical form by writing in the first person and setting a scenario whereby a stranger approaches the house of the grieving mother who lets him in because something about the man that puts her at ease. She then recounts his mission.

I’ve spent years just trying to find you
So I could easily let you know
It was your son’s heart that saved me
And a life you gave us both

Putting real-life stories into song is, of course, nothing new. They date back to great folk artists like Woody Guthrie and indeed his devoted admirer Bob Dylan.

Guthrie too was motivated by news stories when he penned his classic “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).” In January, 1948, Guthrie was appalled that most radio and newspaper coverage of a fatal plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon, California, had not given the names of the victims – apart from the crew and a security guard – but merely referred to the passengers as “deportees:”

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won’t have your names
When you ride the big airplane
All they will call you
Will be deportees

Much of Dylan’s work in his early days around the clubs of Greenwich Village, NY, related to social issues and events of the day. Most of the songs were somewhat abstract in content, but among the more specific was “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” off his ground-breaking 1964 release The Times They Are a-Changin.”

Dylan also saw the story in a newspaper. It was about the death of 51-year-old African American barmaid Hattie Carroll after being attacked by a wealthy tobacco farmer William Zantzinger in downtown Baltimore. Though not all Dylan’s facts were correct – he misspelt the assailant’s name – his song largely portrayed what he saw as a racist attack.

Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle
And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger

Dylan later told a talk-show host: “The story I took out of a newspaper. I used it for something I wanted to say.”

And he said it best in the immortal chorus:

But you who philosophize disgrace
And criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now is the time for your tears

It was this very chorus which influenced Prine when writing one of his most endearing songs based on a real-life event.

It was some 14 years after Dylan’s “Hattie Carroll” that Prine released his dark tale “Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow),” based on his childhood experience when he was an altar boy at a Catholic church in Illinois. One Sunday morning, when he went early to shovel snow off the church steps before Mass, he came across an accident in which another altar boy had been killed by a local commuter train.

Like Dylan, we soon learn in lyrics the facts of the tragedy:

I heard sirens on the train track howl naked gettin’ nuder,
An altar boy’s been hit by a local commuter
Just from walking with his back turned
To the train that was coming so slow.

Then, as in Hattie Carroll,” Prine’s unusual chorus also preaches:

You can gaze out the window get mad and get madder,
Throw your hands in the air, say ‘what does it matter?’
But it don’t do no good to get angry,
So help me I know
For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter.
You become your own prisoner as you watch yourself sit there
Wrapped up in a trap of your very own
Chain of sorrow.

Raitt’s reference to Prine “telling a story from the inside” is no better personified than in one of Prine’s very early songs, “Hello in There,” from his 1971 debut self-titled album, which also includes “Angel from Montgomery” – a song Raitt would make her own with her majestic 1974 version.

Prine used another memory from his upbringing to write “Hello in There.” As a teen, he delivered newspapers in Chicago and his round would include an old people’s home. He later recalled: “When I was writing the song, I thought that these people have entire lives in there. They are not writers but they have a story to tell.”

So Prine chose to reflect on the stories of these elderly folk through the first-person narrative:

We lost Davy in the Korean War
And I still don’t know what for
Doesn’t matter anymore
Ya know that old trees just grow stronger
And old rivers grow wilder every day
Old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say, “hello in there hello”

The success of Raitt’s sorrowful “Just Like That” ballad is a timely reminder that there is still a place in the music industry for good old-fashioned, compassionate story-telling, even if it might be “relegated to formats like Americana.”

The Recording Academy should feel proud it chose a Raitt above a Beyonce! And it should not be intimidated by the multi-million dollar marketing machine which influences the mainstream music media.


Source: © Copyright Americana Music Appreciation

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