by Dean Budnick

Bonnie Raitt has just released her 20th album, the spirited, engaging Dig in Deep. Her follow-up to 2012’s Grammy-winning Slipstream, Dig in Deep captures the vibrant, joyous energy of Raitt’s touring band and directly reflects her outlook through five original songs, which is the most she has written for an album since 1998’s Fundamental. Raitt issued Dig in Deep on her independent Redwing label and has long maintained an active role in the business side of her career.

You contributed five songs to Dig in Deep. Can you talk about how your songwriting has evolved over the years?

I’m not naturally a songwriter. I come up with songs intermittently if I am inspired, usually for a kind of music that I’m missing in my show because I’m basically a touring artist, not a recording artist. Over the years, I have either been so moved by being loved—or by being hurt by love or some kind of inspiration— that I will sit at the piano. I tend to write more of the deep, personal songs on the piano, and the guitar ones tend to be a little more on the bluesy or reggae side, or a jam kind of thing.

I hadn’t written in a long time before this last set of five songs I contributed to Dig in Deep, primarily because I was dealing with illness and the loss of both of my parents, and the eight-year brain cancer fight of my brother, who eventually succumbed in 2009. I was just so depleted. I really needed to take a break and not think about my next record or supporting my band and crew, or what I was going to do next. So I took a muchneeded sabbatical in 2010. I still went to see music, but never to check out what the bass strings sounded like from a particular amp. I didn’t think about whether I would cover a song or not. It was really refreshing.

Then, after the two-year Slipstream tour, I was really excited about a couple of grooves that were missing in my set. The song that’s probably most important to me is “The Ones We Couldn’t Be.” It’s about someone in my family I had a rough time with, who is now gone. While I was writing it, I also knew it had something to do with some previous relationships as well. I looked back and realized that it takes two people to make a relationship work, and it’s often two people that make it fall apart. Ultimately, once you see the ways that you hurt each other or couldn’t be there for each other, it just becomes very sad, no matter how hard you tried. You just couldn’t be the ones that you each wanted the other to be.

Your version of “I Need You Tonight” on Dig in Deep is quite striking. How do you balance honoring a song and making it your own?

Sometimes, I’ll be playing something at a soundcheck or in the studio, and the chord changes will remind me of another song, or I will start singing another song and I will put my own spin on it. Other times, I will just do an out-and-out cover like “Burning Down the House” and, of course, it’s going to sound different than Talking Heads because I play slide guitar and I’m a woman and singing in a different key. Intrinsically, it’s going to sound different when I cover a song done by a male band, but because I am a blues-rock-influenced person, that is the window that I’m looking through.

I have thought about doing that INXS song ever since I first heard it. I knew it would be such a great tune to play slide on when there is that stop and it says, “You’re one of my kind…” I heard that whole arrangement that you hear on this record, and my guitar player, George Marinelli, came up with the killer slashing licks in the beginning.