BONNIE RAITT : JUST LIKE THAT ...

1. Made Up Mind
2. Something's Got A Hold Of My Heart
3. Livin' For The Ones
4. Just Like That
5. When We Say Goodnight
6. Waitin' For You To Blow
7. Blame It On Me
8. Love So Strong
9. Here Comes Love
10. Down The Hall

Label : Redwing Records

Release Date : April 22, 2022

Length : 46:11

Review (AllMusic) : Five decades into her career, Bonnie Raitt shows no desire to stray from her wheelhouse. The blend of rock, blues, soul, reggae, folk, and pop that fuels Just Like That - her 18th album and first since 2016's Dig In Deep - is deeply familiar, evoking memories of her classic 1970s LPs while sounding of a piece with such relaxed latter-day records as Slipstream. Just Like That does sound quite a bit like its immediate predecessors, proceeding at a relaxed gait and bearing a production that gleams yet still contains a hint of grit. Those superficial similarities help highlight the places where Raitt departs from course, notably the quiet acoustic numbers "Just Like That" and "Down the Hall," two compassionate story-songs that owe a debt to John Prine. Raitt doesn't linger on this debt, yet it's clear that mortality is on her mind: "Livin' for the Ones" is a raucous tribute to all those who didn't manage to survive the COVID-19 pandemic, a legion that includes reggae legend Toots Hibbert, whose "Love So Strong" Raitt covers here. All these nods aren't subtle - neither is the knowing recovery anthem "Waitin' for You to Blow" - but they're delivered with a casual grace that gives them a deeper emotional resonance. The same sentiment applies to the ample number of love songs here, particularly Al Anderson's "Something's Got a Hold of My Heart" which has a mellow groove that would not have seemed out of place during the heyday of yacht rock. It all adds up to an album that slowly works its way into the subconscious, sounding deeper and richer with each successive play.

Review (Pitchfork) : Six years since her last studio album, the veteran singer-songwriter and slide guitarist returns with a collection of robust professional rock that may inspire deep dives into her back catalog. If the young feel hard and forget fast, adults feel hard and remember long. To her credit, Bonnie Raitt has never courted the youth market. Avoiding disco strings and guest raps, the slide-guitar legend has amassed a body of work immersed in the blues and fully committed to the Well-Written Song; both her chosen repertoire and the material she's penned herself adduce a belief in adulthood as a well-earned grace. Her sunny, wide-open voice and the sparkling correctness of her playing have kept bathos at bay ever since she invested Eric Kaz's "Love Has No Pride," one of her chestnuts, with an aw-shucks sensual abandonment: She's in love, yet damn straight she keeps her pride. Thirty-three years after Nick of Time, which yielded perhaps the most career-changing Grammy coronation in history, and six years since her last studio album, Dig in Deep, Raitt returns with Just Like That., a self-produced effort boasting most of her strengths: a fidelity to the material that borders on the idolatrous, a penchant for leading mostly male pros through unfamiliar paces, and the exquisite precision of her guitar. As for weaknesses-well, she could have ventured further afield with the covers, as she did with Dig in Deep's sly take on INXS' "Need You Tonight." Still, she sounds good, she plays better, and her band, co-led by longtime foil George Marinelli, simmers. A fine career summation should she choose to stop, Just Like That. is robust professional rock, a demonstration of Raitt's vitality, like, say, Catherine Deneuve's recent film work. Her 18th album cedes a few of the solos she and Marinelli might have played to Glenn Patscha, a first-rate organist whose fills have the lightness of Charles Hodges. On her own "Waitin' for You to Blow," she lays down the guitar so Kenny Greenberg and Patscha can exchange solos over Ricky Fataar's hi-hats. "Something's Got a Hold of My Heart" gets a lift from Patscha's Fender Rhodes colors, given a mixing boost by Raitt and Ryan Freeland (the funereal "Blame It on Me" is the only lapse into heavy-handedness). A chugging little thing familiar to fans of her 1973 cover of Martha and the Vandellas' "You've Been in Love Too Long," her band's take on the Bros. Landreth's "Made Up Mind" greases up a melody "like a rainstorm tin-roof symphony." But they falter with a static reggae-lite version of Toots and the Maytals' "Love So Strong"; it has a skank but not much else. WATCH Explore Fleet Foxes' Self-Titled Debut (in 5 Minutes) When Raitt keeps things fresh with narrative writing, the cleanness of her melodies and lyrics deepens her empathy. With the help of an acoustic lick that's the stepchild of the Beatles' "Blackbird " and Patscha's shimmering organ, "Down the Hall" examines a man's stint in a prison infirmary; he observes Tyrone, "cancer eatin' him inside out," takes time to shave Julio's head and, "crackin' him up," wash his feet. The Springsteen of Nebraska might have smiled with recognition, but Raitt's contralto repels attempts to imbue "Down the Hall" with existential portent. Its just-the-facts approach is closer to Springsteen influences like Bobbie Ann Mason than Nebraska. Just Like That. may inspire catalog deep dives. Many fans' relationship with Raitt began with 1991's Luck of the Draw, the septuple-platinum follow-up to Nick of Time that remains a landmark of boomer pop outreach-as much a generational touchstone as Paul Simon's Graceland, the sort of album Mom and Dad played on vacation road trips because here was a woman Mom's age having fun making her most powerful music at middle age. In a summer when Bryan Adams strangled the top 40 with a mousy ballad sprung from Kevin Costner's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, "Something to Talk About" was a well-deserved hit, sexy in a mature, fully cognizant way; you'd have to go back to Fleetwood Mac's "Little Lies" to find as worldly a Top Five hit sung by a fortysomething white woman. And her take on Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin's "I Can't Make You Love Me" is the kind of recording that comes along just once in an artist's career, though it's echoed in the pungent aphorisms of Just Like That.'s "Down the Hall": "I don't know about religion/I only know what I see." It's okay if few performances on Just Like That. match that highlight. Most of her albums contain time bombs; even records like 1986's Nine Lives, regarded as misbegotten, have miracles of grace like "Crime of Passion" that reward the digging. But Just Like That. will do-ostensible hand-me-downs like the Stones-y "Livin' for the Ones" shame that band's recent output, for example. The album title is the giveaway. Pros know their shit.

Review (The New York Times) : Who would expect a Bonnie Raitt song to start like this? "Had the flu in the prison infirmary," she sings in "Down the Hall," from 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 plain-spoken diction of a John Prine song. Based on a New York Times story, it is narrated by a convict, a murderer, who finds a kind of atonement in becoming a prison hospice worker: "The thought of those guys goin' out alone/It hit me somewhere deep," she sings, as Glenn Patscha's organ chords swell behind her like glimmers of redemption. "Down the Hall" is the somber finale to "Just Like That.," Raitt's first album since 2016. The music's style is familiar; Raitt, 72, reconvened her longtime band members, who are old hands at blues, soul, ballads and reggae, and she produced the tracks with the feel of musicians performing together in real time, savoring grooves and finding warmth in human imperfections. Continue reading the main story But the album was recorded in 2021, well into the pandemic, and it shows. Along with her usual insights into grown-up love, desire, heartbreak and regret, Raitt's latest collection of songs directly faces mortality. "Livin' for the Ones," with words by Raitt and music by the band's guitarist George Marinelli, is a Rolling Stones-flavored rocker, with strummed and sliding guitars tumbling across the backbeat. It draws a life force from mourning, countering petty impulses toward lethargy or self-pity with the blunt recognition of so many lives lost: "If you ever start to bitch and moan," Raitt sings, "Just remember the ones who won't/Ever feel the sun on their faces again." Thanks for reading The Times. Subscribe to The Times Another kind of solace after death arrives in the quietly poignant title track of "Just Like That.," also written by Raitt. Its story unfolds at a measured pace. A stranger shows up on the doorstep of a woman who has never stopped blaming herself for the death of her son. The man has sought her out because he's the one who got her son's heart as a transplant: "I lay my head upon his chest/And I was with my boy again," Raitt sings, with sorrow and relief in the grain of her voice. The rest of the album features Raitt's more typical fare: songs about love lost and found, about getting together or drifting apart. "Made Up Mind," from the Canadian band Bros. Landreth, opens the album with a stolid portrait of a slow-motion separation, feeling "the quiet behind a slamming door." Its counterbalance is "Something's Got a Hold of My Heart," an Al Anderson song about a late-arriving, unexpected romance. Yet mortality haunts even the love songs. The album includes Raitt's remake of "Love So Strong" by the reggae pioneer Toots Hibbert, who led Toots and the Maytals and died in 2020 after being hospitalized for Covid-like symptoms. "Blame It on Me," by John Capek and Andrew Matheson, is a bluesy, torchy, slow-dance breakup ballad that couches accusations in apologies, warning that "Truth is love's first casualty"; near the end, Raitt turns the tables with an exquisite, sustained, breaking high note. The song also assigns some of the blame to time, which has, "Poured like sand through your hands and mine." Editors' Picks Reconsidering the Spice Girls: How Manufactured Girl Power Became Real A New York Bagel From an Unexpected Borough: Connecticut Anglo-Saxon Kings Made Sure to Eat Their Vegetables, Study Shows Continue reading the main story Understanding that life is finite, the stakes are higher for every relationship, every moment. On "Just Like That.," Raitt calls for compassion, consolation and perseverance to get through with grace.