Who would have expected a Bonnie Raitt song to start like this? “Had the flu in the prison hospital,” she sings in “Down the Hall,” off her new album, “Just Like That,” which arrives more than half a century after her debut.
“Down the Hall” is a folky, fingerpicked ballad, written by Raitt, with the clear diction of a John Prine song. Based on a DailyExpertNews story, it is told by a convict, a murderer, who finds some sort of reconciliation by becoming a hospice worker in prison: “The thought of those guys going out alone / It touched me somewhere deep,” she said. sings, as Glenn Patscha’s organ chords swell behind her like glimpses of redemption.
“Down the Hall” is the somber finale of “Just Like That”, Raitt’s first album since 2016. The style of the music is well known; Raitt, 72, reunited her longtime bandmates, who are old hands at blues, soul, ballads and reggae, and she produced the songs with the feel of musicians performing together in real time, finding grooving flavors and warmth in human imperfections.
But the album was recorded in 2021, well into the pandemic, and it shows. In addition to her usual insights into mature love, desire, heartbreak and regret, Raitt’s latest collection of songs is directly confronted with mortality.
“Livin’ for the Ones,” with words by Raitt and music by guitarist George Marinelli, is a Rolling Stones-flavored rocker, with strummed and sliding guitars tumbling over the backbeat. It draws a life force from mourning, counteracting small impulses to lethargy or self-pity with the blunt acknowledgment of so many lives lost: “If you ever begin to whine and moan,” Raitt sings, “Think of those who don’t / Never again feel the sun on their faces.”
Another kind of after-death comfort comes in the quietly poignant title track of “Just Like That,” also written by Raitt. The story unfolds at a measured pace. A stranger stands at the doorstep of a woman who always blames herself for her son’s death. The man has sought her out because he is the one who got her son’s heart as a transplant: “I lay my head on his chest / And I was with my boy again”, Raitt sings, with sadness and relief in the grain of her voice .
The rest of the album contains Raitt’s more typical rhythm: songs about love lost and found, about coming together or drifting apart. “Made Up Mind”, by Canadian band Bros. Landreth, opens the album with a tough portrait of a slow-motion divorce, “the silence behind a slamming door”. The counterbalance is “Something’s Got a Hold of My Heart,” an Al Anderson song about a late-arrival, unexpected romance.
But mortality haunts even the love songs. The album features Raitt’s remake of “Love So Strong” by reggae pioneer Toots Hibbert, who led Toots and the Maytals and died in 2020 after being hospitalized due to Covid-like symptoms. “Blame It on Me”, by John Capek and Andrew Matheson, is a bluesy, flamboyant, slow-dance break-up ballad that turns accusations into apologies and warns that “the truth is love’s first victim”; towards the end, Raitt turns the tables with a superb, sustained, breaking high note. The song also assigns some of the blame to the time, which has, “Casted like sand through your hands and mine.”
Understanding that life is finite, the stakes are higher for any relationship, any moment. On “Just Like That,” Raitt calls for compassion, comfort, and perseverance to get through it with grace.
Bonnie Raitt
“Just like that”
(red wing)
