Bonnie Raitt

While Bonnie Raitt was preparing, recording, releasing and touring behind her 15th studio album, Souls Alike, she lost both her parents. Her mother, Marjorie Goddard, died from Alzheimer’s on July 2, 2004, and her father, the Broadway star John Raitt, died of pneumonia on February 20, 2005. The younger Raitt was able to take time from studio sessions, meetings and tour dates to say goodbye to each parent. What she didn’t have time for was properly mourning them. To further complicate matters, her big brother Steve, a Minnesota sound engineer, had contracted terminal cancer.

“With all that loss not properly processed,” she says soberly, “I had to take some time off. You need time to grieve, and you can’t be running a big operation while you’re doing that. I did that 2009 tour with Taj Mahal and a few one-month or one-week runs, but that’s not the same as planning a new album and then touring to support it. That’s all-consuming. So I took some years off.”

That’s why Raitt seemed to disappear for seven years, but now she’s back with her 16th studio album, Slipstream, on her own, brand-new label, Redwing Records. It’s only the third company she’s recorded for in 40 years. The 1971-1986 Warner Bros. years were an era of deep folk and blues roots that made her a critical favorite, if also a commercial also-ran. The 1991-2005 Capitol years marked the triumphant reward for that good work in the form of top-10 hits and Grammy Awards. The Redwing years begin now with a disc split between a continuation of her old sound and the exploration of a very different one.

Seven of the tracks on Slipstream were produced by Raitt backed by her crackerjack road band: ex-Hendrix keyboardist Mike Finnigan, ex-Beach Boys drummer Ricky Fataar, ex-Bruce Hornsby and the Range guitarist George Marinelli and bassist John “Hutch” Hutchinson. The songwriters are just as familiar (NRBQ’s Al Anderson, Ireland’s Paul Brady, ex-husband Michael O’Keefe and Sea Level’s Randall Bramblett) and so is the sound: a funky brand of roots-rock led by Raitt’s slide guitar and sly but powerful alto.

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The other four tracks, though, were produced by Joe Henry with a band led by jazz guitarists Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz; two of the songs were written by Bob Dylan, and the other two by Henry. The result is a kind of Americana-jazz that is understated and moody, full of odd, reverberating chords. It’s unlike anything Raitt has done before.

“Because I’d been gone a long time,” Raitt says. “I wanted to do some songs in the old style to let the fans know I hadn’t changed that much. But I also wanted to try something new, because that makes it more interesting for them—and for me too.

“Joe Henry was at the top of my list of people to reach out to, because he had produced several friends of mine. I really like his songwriting, and I had two songs of his I knew I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to do the more rocking and blues side of me with my band, because I didn’t want to abandon them. We’re together all the time on the road, and I wanted to keep that juice going.”

None of the songs on Slipstream directly address the themes of death and loss, but there are subtle allusions. “You took a part of me that I really miss; I keep asking myself, ‘How long can it go on like this?’” she sings over Frisell’s ghostly guitar echoes on Dylan’s “Million Miles.” Above Leisz’s chiming steel guitar on Dylan’s “Standing in the Doorway,” she laments, “I hear the church bells ringing in the yard; wonder who they’re ringing for?” On Henry’s “God Only Knows,” accompanied only by Patrick Warren’s stark piano, she sings, “Darkness settles on the ground, leaves the day stumbling blind, coming to a quiet close.” The other tracks are more typical observations on new love, old love, bad love and good love.

“I couldn’t address that loss directly in songs,” she says; “it was too soon to delve into that. I admire that album Rosanne Cash made about her father’s death, but I couldn’t do that now. Maybe later on I will. I do think that life experiences like these make you sing more deeply.”

She had every intention of only cutting three or four songs with Henry, but she got so excited by the new band and the new sound, that she just kept going and ended up recording a lot more than she had intended. But this presented a dilemma. Combined with the sessions by her road band, she had more songs than would fit on a single CD.

She thought about releasing everything as a double-CD set but decided that was too much to ask of her fans after a seven-year absence—and too much to ask of a label trying to just get off the ground. She thought of releasing each session as a stand-alone album, but she didn’t have enough finished songs from the road-band sessions, and she didn’t want the Henry sessions to sit unreleased for a year while she promoted the other record. So she settled on the hybrid approach: an album that combined the two sessions. She promises that she will release the rest of the Henry sessions as an EP or as part of another album.

Before she could start choosing songs for the two sessions, however, she had to take some time off and recover from her parents’ back-to-back deaths. Meanwhile, her brother continued to decline until his death in 2009.

“I had this fantasy that I was going to have time to read poetry, take out an easel to do watercolors and travel to the South Seas like those professors on sabbatical do,” she reveals with a rueful chuckle. “In fact, I needed to sort out all my parents’ things and brother’s things and figure out where they would go. Believe me, running away with the circus on tour is a lot less challenging than staying home and dealing with all that. But it was stuff that needed to get done, so I stayed home and did it. I was looking forward to the time off like people look forward to Christmas, but they forget how many meals and how much cleaning up you have to do.

“But I did spend some time resting, hiking, doing yoga, visiting friends, letting the seasons unfold one at a time in the same place, which I don’t think I’d ever done. It was very restorative. I wanted to be away until I wanted to come back. That’s unusual. When you’re on a label, there’s a timeline when they expect new recordings. It’s not just making the music in the studio; it’s a million other things too. You have to suit up for the business part of it. There’s the clothes, the touring, the art work, and I want to have a hand in all of it.”

For Raitt, who writes relatively few songs (she has just one co-writing credit on Slipstream), the longest, most challenging part of a new record is finding the right material. She’s always received demos from songwriters—and once she had those hits on Capitol, the volume of demos increased exponentially. But she also reads music magazines for tips; she buys CDs that look promising and leaves them in piles in her kitchen and car so she can slip one into the nearest player. Like most people, she and her friends are always emailing each other links to songs they like. She loads songs onto her iPod and sticks in the ear buds whenever she goes biking or hiking around the Bay Area, where she now lives.

“Every once in a while something will grab me,” she explains, “even if I’m doing something else. How do I know? Well, remember the first time you heard ‘Start Me Up’ or Howlin’ Wolf? It’s like that. It’s a burning in your solar plexus; it connects your head to your heart to your bottom. I may not end up recording the song for any number of reasons, but I always know when a song resonates with me that way. The lyrics have to be smart and deep enough and the music has to be close, though I can always adapt that.”

Once she and Henry agreed to work together, he sent her some song ideas, including the Dylan tunes. These weren’t the early Dylan songs that everyone covers but rather the late-career numbers that are often overlooked.

“There’s been a deepening and a greater complexity in his more recent songs,” she argues. “Time Out of Mind seemed like a classic to me the first time I heard it. At the same time, the songs he wrote in his 20s sound very old and experienced to me, like Richard Thompson’s ‘Dimming of the Day’ and John Prine’s ‘Angel from Montgomery,’ which were also written when they were in their 20s.”

Raitt, now 62, has grown deeper and more complex herself during her hiatus out of the public eye. If she has the courage to follow her curiosity about Dylan’s dark tales and Frisell’s fractured harmonies even further into the shadowy forest, this third phase of her career may be her best yet.