Folk and Tumble album reviews of the latest studio and live record releases from folk, Americana, blues, and country artists across the world.

Ringing slide guitar and soulful vocals combine on ‘Just Like That’ to make Bonnie Raitt’s new release a memorable one.

Her trademark slide guitar, which has made her the envy of players everywhere, remains a thing of joy, effortlessly on display throughout. When Bonnie chooses to rock, everyone knows it.  Bonnie has championed many writers in the past, whose work may have been passed by. The Brothers Landreth is a case in point on this offering. Bonnie stays close to the Canadian band’s original on the soul-infused ‘Made up Mind’, and yet she still stamps her own identity on it with a beautiful velvet delivery.

‘Love So Strong’ was intended as a duet with Toots Hibbert, but sadly following his death, it’s played here as a heartfelt tribute.  ‘Something’s Got a Hold of My Heart’ by NRBQ’s Al Alderson is another ready-made standard for the seemingly ageless singer.  This time around, Bonnie has written, or co-written 4 of the 10 tracks herself, more than on any other album.

‘Livin’ For the Ones’ is co-written with her long-time guitarist George Marinelli, for the friends and family she has lost. This is a song that will connect, and resonate with so many people. Both an upbeat celebration of life, and a love song to those lost to Covid, and beyond. A song that is universal in its scope, but so personal in its interpretation for each listener. And it rocks!  ‘Down the Hall’ is a true story set in the hospice of a prison, with a prisoner caring for his dying fellow inmates with compassion and truth, a task that ultimately frees the narrator from his own bars.

The title track concerns the impact of a heart transplant on two families, one the donor’s mother, and one the recipient. It’s a heart-wrenching story of loss and sacrifice, acceptance, and common humanity:

One can almost hear Bonnie’s great friend, John Prine singing that last line. But there’s resolution and closure too

Bonnie has spoken of the style of narrative in these songs:

“I’ve always loved the early guitar songs of Dylan, Jackson Browne, Paul Brady, and especially John Prine” she says. “With songs like ‘Angel from Montgomery’ and ‘Donald and Lydia’ John was able to just climb inside and sing these people’s deepest lives. With his passing last year, finishing these songs has meant even more.”

Bonnie hasn’t written that much over her career, which is a shame, because it is such a gift to be able to write such succinct and eloquent distillations of the human experience.

Following two years of isolation and loss of loved ones from the pandemic, and mired as the world is, at the minute in conflict and hate, Bonnie’s songs speak to the grace and humanity that the heart can aspire to. ‘Just Like That’ is an album for these times, and all time.

About The Author

Damian McNairney

Contributor

Damian McNairney is a regular contributor to Folk and Tumble having interviewed artists such as Jesse Malin and Steven van Zandt.

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Six years since her last studio album, the veteran singer-songwriter and slide guitarist returnswith 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.

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.

About The Author

Alfred Soto

Contributor

Alfred Soto is an assistant professor of communication at Florida International University. His work has appeared in Billboard, Spin, The Village Voice, the Miami Herald, and others. He was an associate editor of The Singles Jukebox. He lives in Miami.

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