Awards

Grammy-winning song hits close to home for Bonnie Raitt’s bassist
Maui resident James Hutchinson knows firsthand the meaning of ‘Just Like That’

on March 30, 2023 No comments
Jon Woodhouse | For the Maui News

When Bonnie Raitt received the Grammy Award for Song of the Year for “Just Like That” in February, her band’s longtime bass player, James “Hutch” Hutchinson, was watching on TV in Los Angeles. Raitt had earlier won Grammys for Best American Roots Song for “Just Like That” and Best Americana Performance for “Made Up Mind,” which meant her band all shared in the award.

“We were all shocked,” said Hutchinson, who has played with Raitt for 40 years and has made Maui his home for 20 years. “We were up for four awards, three of them in the Americana category. We won the first two and then the third one, Americana Album of the Year, Brandi Carlile won and she got up and said, ‘I can’t believe I won this. I thought Bonnie was going to sweep again.’

Bonnie Raitt with James “Hutch” Hutchinson 2019
© Maike Schulz /Gruber Photographers

“We were thrilled to win two out of three,” Hutchinson continued. “The performance award is a band award. Then, of course, the icing on the cake was when she won for Song of the Year, which is the award she really wanted because she’s the sole composer of the tune. So it was big, a big deal.”

Heading to the Maui Arts and Cultural Center for a concert on Friday, Raitt has now won 13 Grammys, including some for her multimillion-selling albums, “Nick of Time” and “Luck of the Draw.”

The title song of Raitt’s latest album, “Just Like That” is an emotionally wrenching song that has touched so many people. She based it on a news story about a mother who donated her deceased son’s organs. It was the first song written by a solo composer to win the award since Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.”

“‘Just Like That’ is about a woman who loses a son and organ donation, and the trials and tribulations, and the redemption that sometimes comes along with it,” said Hutchinson. “Many a night on stage, I’ve had an emotional reaction to it. She was broken up, as she is every time she sings anything that means something to her.”

The song was especially heartbreaking for Hutchinson as he lost his sister, Ann Hutchinson Tower, the week of the awards, and “she ended up saving two women. Her kidneys went to two younger, fit women in their 50s. Organ donation is important, but I didn’t think I’d be living that song the week we won Song of the Year for it. It was one of the more bizarre, surreal moments of my entire life. There’s been extreme highs and extreme lows.”

In a tough couple of months, he also lost a handful of musician friends, including David Lindley and David Crosby. Hutchinson had been getting ready to head out on tour with Crosby, and had previously recorded with him, and Crosby with Graham Nash, and with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

“I’ve known David for 50 years,” he explained. “I met him when I was 19. He was always in my life, a sort of a mentor and friend and a bandmate many times. The rehearsals in December sounded great. I’d never seen him happier. He was ready to go out and do a final tour. I just loved working with him. My proudest musical moments are anything with David Crosby. I miss him so much.”

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Player’s Pick Podcast #63 – James “Hutch” Hutchinson – December 2020

Talk with Hutchinson and he will regale you with 50 years of encounters with a myriad array of famous musicians, from recording with the Rolling Stones in Ireland to rock ‘n’ roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis. His remarkable list of recording credits includes Ringo Starr, B.B. King, Elton John, Brian Wilson, Al Green, Willie Nelson, Stevie Nicks, Ziggy Marley, Jackson Browne, the Doobie Brothers, Joe Cocker, Roy Orbison, Garth Brooks and Neil Diamond.

What was it like playing with the Beatles’ legendary drummer?

“Ringo is great. He’s funny, and he’s great to be around,” Hutchinson said. “He’s just a fantastic musician, and he loves music and he loves people. I worked with Ringo a number of times. I love people who are easy and fun to work with.”

Proclaimed “The Groove King” by Bass Musician magazine, Hutchinson can comfortably fit into any genre.

His local collaborations include recording with other musicians on Maui like Grammy winner Peter Kater, Pat Simmons Jr. and Gail Swanson. He toured the Mainland with Hapa and was also a regular at Shep Gordon’s Wailea benefit shows. Teaming with John Cruz, he played on a star-studded “Playing for Change” video of “The Weight,” and was filmed in Haiku with Pat Simmons in a marvelous updating of Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train.”

Back on the road with the “Just Like That Tour 2023,” Hutchinson said the Maui show will include “at least four songs” from the latest album.

“The set list changes,” he said. “We know a lot of tunes and you can only play so many per night, and there’s some we have to play. People expect ‘Something to Talk About’ and ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me.’ People want to hear those songs.”

The Maui leg of Raitt’s Just Like That Tour 2023 takes place on Friday at the MACC’s A&B Amphitheater. John Cruz will open. The show begins at 7 p.m. and gates open at 5 p.m. Tickets are $60, $80, $100 and $140 Gold Circle, plus applicable fees, at MauiArts.org.


Source: © Copyright The Maui News

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Tim Davern: Just Like That

on March 17, 2023 No comments
by Dr. Tim Davern

A Grammy-winning song reminds Dr. Tim Davern of the life-and-death miracle of organ transplants.

This past February, I was surprised and delighted that Bonnie Raitt won song of the year at the Grammys against stiff competition from several pop star leviathans.

I knew Raitt’s reputation as a respected singer-songwriter, but hadn’t heard her winning song, “Just Like That”. Intrigued by her Grammy selection, I found the lyric video on YouTube as I drifted to sleep later that night. My eyes welled with tears as I listened to her beautiful voice vividly narrate the heartbreaking story of a middle-aged woman tormented by guilt, sorrow and loneliness in the wake of a sudden tragic accident 25 years before that took her young son. When a mysterious young man appears at her door, we learn that he has been long searching to thank her for the gift of life as he was the recipient of her son’s heart, which she hears beating in his chest when they hug. The heart connects them, giving the man life and the mother the peace, redemption and grace that had so long eluded her.

As a transplant physician, I found this magnificent song to be a stark reminder that each deceased donor organ transplant represents a tragic paradox: it is a miraculous gift of life for the fortunate transplant recipient, but an unimaginable tragedy for the donor family.

The transplant team focuses on the former, desperately trying to keep patients with end-stage organ failure alive for life-saving transplants, and we appropriately celebrate each one. But Raitt reminds us that while the successful transplant represents the recipient patient and family’s best day, it is simultaneously the donor family’s worst. Joy and grief, life and death – like yin and yang – are inextricably linked. Thus, each transplant should be both a celebration and a time for somber reflection and thanks for sacrifices made.

Thank you, Bonnie Raitt, for this masterpiece and important reminder, and thank you to all of the donors and donor families for the greatest gift of all – the gift of life.

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With a Perspective, this is Tim Davern.

Tim Davern is a transplant hepatologist, internal medicine doctor, gastroenterologist, and primary care doctor.


Source: © Copyright KQED

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‘I’m 73 and it shows’: The blues legend who beat Taylor Swift and Harry Styles

on March 13, 2023 No comments
Bill Wyman

There was a twist at the end of this year’s Grammy Awards. After a parade of youthful and spangled pop stars rose to the podium for various honours, the Song of the Year prize went to one Bonnie Raitt, the veteran singer-songwriter and guitarist with a distinguished 50-year career behind her, including, among other things, a previous Grammy for album of the year.

But that didn’t stop some second-tier news outlets from wondering who the hell had beaten out Lizzo, Harry Styles and Taylor Swift.

“Unknown Blues Singer Wins Song of the Year” blared several sites. The headlines soon went viral.

“That was a big surprise,” Raitt, 73, admits. “I was overwhelmed with appreciation.”

She produced the album, Just Like That…, her 18th, herself. She wrote a big chunk of it, too, and it was released on her own record label, Redwing. She’s been doing this for a while, but this time, two tracks, the title song, and the album’s closing tune, Down the Hall, connected with fans, and the larger world, in an unexpected way.

Both songs are wrenching, not because they contain sensitive personal revelations, but because of their unusual stories.

Down the Hall is told from the point of view of a prisoner who ends up working in the jail’s hospice ward, sitting with terminal inmates who have no one else. Just Like That, the Song of the Year winner, is a gentle, luminously presented tale about a woman who lost her son. But the son’s heart had been donated to someone who needed it. The recipient visits the mother and invites her to lay her head on his chest, so she can feel her departed son’s heart beating.

“Organ donation and prison hospices are not songs people generally write songs about,” Raitt says. “I think it has something to do with reaching people at such a time, with COVID and the shutdowns and the political animosity. These songs are about uplight and grace and redemption. I didn’t write them for those reasons but I think that’s why they landed this time.”

In the post-’60s wave of ’70s singer-songwriters, featuring everyone from Jackson Browne to Randy Newman to Cat Stevens, Raitt stood out. There was that redwood voice of hers. Plus she was a guitarist, self-trained and steeped in influences stretching back into deep folk and blues. Raitt is not a tall woman and the image of the diminutive singer displaying her mastery of her large and beloved Gibson hollow-body guitar became iconic.

You can hear in Bonnie Raitt’s voice her own life’s journey mixed in with those of her blues heroes © Marina Chavez

“I still have that guitar!” she exclaims.

She was unusual in other ways. Not all her fans knew her father was an icon, too: Broadway legend John Raitt. Bonnie learned to play guitar at the family house in the Hollywood Hills and went to university at Radcliffe, at the time the women’s college of Harvard.

She put out her first record, Give It Up Bonnie Raitt, in 1972 1971, the songs almost uniformly marked by her strong blues and rock licks. Her interpretation of John Prine’s Angel from Montgomery became her signature song, and a cover of Del Shannon’s early 60s chestnut Runaway gave her an unexpected hit single in 1977. “The ’70s were a blast,” she says.

Then she was dropped by her label. Follow-up albums didn’t do well. She fought drug and alcohol addiction.

But she came roaring back in the 1990s. The aptly titled Nick of Time sold five million copies and won that Album of the Year Grammy. A popular MTV video saw her canoodling with actor buddy Dennis Quaid to the song Thing Called Love.

Gracious and quick, Raitt crisscrosses her history, mentioning friends, mentors, artists gone and others still around, people she played with and those with whom she conspires to this day, from Bruce Springsteen, Linda Ronstadt, Browne and Prince to Muddy Waters and Emmylou Harris.

But the friend she remembers the most is the late Prine, the quirky, much-loved Chicago singer-songwriter who never quite rose to mass public attention. “That type of songwriting was so inspired by John,” she says.

These days, you can hear in that voice her own life’s journey mixed in with those of her blues heroes. It’s suggested that she did not so much grow into her voice but see her voice grow into her.

“That’s great,” she agrees. “After I hit 50 I could get other ranges and other colours and reflect other experiences I’ve had. I’m 73, and it shows!”

Bonnie Raitt plays Palais Theatre, Melbourne on April 5, ICC Sydney on April 7, Bluesfest, Byron Bay, on April 9 and 10.

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Source: © Copyright The Sydney Morning Herald

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