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Raitt unchanged on new album |
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Written by JEFF CEBULSKI
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Tuesday, 13 September 2005 |
With the lovely rust-red tinged cover photo of her new CD displaying her broad smile, those lovely locks, and her trusty Fender evincing graceful middle-age, singer-guitarist Bonnie Raitt has now become America’s female Eric Clapton.
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Bonnie Raitt
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 Entertainment
 Art
"Souls Alike"
(Capitol)
Released September 13, 2005
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While "Souls Alike" replicates much of what the artist’s fans have heard over the past decade, the new album finds her performing in an even less provincial manner, settling into a middle-of-the-road vein that makes use of her guitar chops more as filler than as a threaded, characteristic style. Those of us who became enamored with this filly as she traveled a long and sometimes lonely blues highway looking for love have seen our slide-slinging hero gradually evolve to polished studio performer and producer. No doubt her live, sensual performances are still riveting, but one can only wonder how some of these new songs will sound when they leave their aural confines.
The new CD’s overall thematic trope seems to suggest Raitt’s desire for a grounding of sorts following tragedies of the previous few years, including a divorce and the death of her father, Broadway statesman John Raitt. The redhead looked for less caustic, more hopeful lyrics from some of Nashville’s younger writers who like to use fluid metaphors (such as “water”) to suggest time as a cleansing, healing agent rather than a procurator of death. Raitt’s signature slide guitar work graces the material but not too liberally, advancing the idea that the swagger of earlier albums is mitigated at the moment by a lingering sensitivity that calls for finery over flash.
After a radio-friendly proclamation, “I Will Not Be Broken,” Raitt sings a Randall Bramlett song that evokes a scene of isolation, but with a sense of promise, “God Was in the Water.” She sings, “God was in the air that day / Circlin’ like a drunken hawk / Sweepin’ with a hungry eye / Over the ground I walk.” Later, in “Deep Water,” the metaphor turns into a conceit of passion: “I want to scratch your name upon my wall / Cause I’m drowning here beneath love’s waterfall.”
As the CD progresses, Raitt reclaims the fightin’ feline identity of past albums - but cautiously. Jon Cleary’s “Love on One Condition” may not be fightin’ words, but the woman lays down a standard for domestic forgiveness: “Come home every night, no more carryin’ on.” However, any sense of communal bliss is soon replaced by the insecurity of one who has been burned before. “So Close” finds her wondering “Suppose / This is that one promised love / God knows / All that I’ve wasted now / Never letting it start.”
The slickly produced CD’s only real connection to rustic roots comes in Emory Joseph’s cheesy “Trinkets,” where Bonnie takes on the persona of a Louisiana-bred woman who is satisfied with down-home simplicity and child-like, unfettered freedom.
But this bucolic sentimentality can be understood as a desire to share the lessons of rough living with a generation of adults who want to reign in and control their children’s destiny. Bonnie may have had to reign in her own maternal desires, but she can use her music to advance any age-old wisdom that comes along for the inevitable ride to glory.
While in “Trinkets,” she muses about getting “to a gate at the end of the sky” and meeting a “beautiful creature” who asks for her desires - “a record and a picture and a wiener dog” - she lands squarely back on earth to face humbly whatever destiny comes.
She borrows Maia Sharp’s “Crooked Crown,” faces yet another “Unnecessarily Mercenary” male, and finally reverts back to the fluidity of fleeting romance, the blues singer’s mantra: “No river can hold you darlin’ / No covers can hide you tying your shoes…So slide on over and forget it’s wrong / We’re two lights in the nighttime baby.”
In the end, Raitt’s own production points to what the lady wants: hope, peace, and a sense of control to regenerate a feisty spirit, even in the face of doubt, as represented in “I Don’t Want to Change”: I know the truth is right outside / But for the moment it’s best denied / I don’t want anything to change
Which is where we are left, with Bonnie Unchanged, for the time being.
Photos courtesy of Bonnie RaittPowered by AkoComment 2.0! |
