Down the Dirt Road with Bonnie Raitt

In "The Life and Times of Bonnie Raitt in Eight Songs," the icon looks back over her life and career—triumphs, potholes and all

Back in January, I posted a five-minute snippet of an hour-long interview I conducted with Bonnie Raitt in February 2022 for the June 2022 issue of Stereophile magazine. Since the arc of Bonnie’s life is common knowledge, I chose to go not with a personal but, rather, a musical narrative: a 50-plus-year memoir in eight songs, from 1971’s “Big Road Blues,” by one of the Mississippi Delta’s Johnsons—Tommy, not Robert—to the new album’s “Waitin’ For You to Blow,” the unsparing self-examination of an individual (namely, most of us) in ever-present danger of backsliding into self-destructive habits.

When we spoke, Bonnie was getting ready to release her 20^th album, Just Like That, with which she would add two Grammys to the 11 she’d already taken home, including 1990’s Album of the Year: Nick of Time, perhaps Raitt’s career centerpiece. Our 4,000-plus-word Stereophile interview had a lot of unseemly fat, so here’s a version that takes a prudent middle path. I expanded those teeny five minutes to a half-hour’s worth of talk, while slicing hunks from that overstuffed original (which you can find online, if you’re a completist). So here is a lean & mean Raitt, with all the good stuff left in, including a few useful footnotes.

The songs I chose span Raitt’s entire career (thus far), from 1971 to 2022. The songs: “Big Road Blues” (Bonnie Raitt, 1971); “Let Me In” (Takin’ My Time, 1973); “About to Make Me Leave Home” and “Three Time Loser” (Sweet Forgiveness, 1977); “Nick of Time” (Nick of Time, 1990); “I Can’t Make You Love Me” (Road Tested, 1995); “Ain’t Gonna Let You Go” (Slipstream, 2012), and “Waitin’ For You to Blow” (Just Like That, 2022).

So settle in and listen to one of rock & roll’s all-time greats reflect on a 50-plus-year career that is by no means over: as I write this, Bonnie is making last-minute preparations for a tour that’ll take her through November 2024. The road is Bonnie Raitt’s middle name.