C. Elliott
Audio By Carbonatix
“Every moment there’s a chance for redemption,” Bonnie Raitt said Sunday, adjusting the acoustic guitar slung across her body.
Her fingers teasing fleeting notes from the fretboard, the 75-year-old singer-songwriter was about to perform the title track of her most recent studio album, 2022’s Just Like That … and her observation – simple and well-worn though it may be – was about the fictional woman at the center of the song’s narrative.
But it wasn’t much of a leap to see the connection between her sentiment and the evening’s unspoken yet powerful undercurrent: Time, bearing us all ceaselessly forward, carried along past hope and regret, realization and reckoning.
Her 100-minute set inside a sold-out Winspear Opera House was her first local appearance in a little over two years, and a sturdy, soulful showcase for one of America’s most enduring performers.
Backed by four locked-in musicians – guitarist Duke Levine, keyboardist/backing vocalist Glenn Patscha, drummer Ricky Fataar and bassist James “Hutch” Hutchinson – Raitt pulled from across her catalog, reaching all the way back to her self-titled 1971 debut (with the song “Women Be Wise”) through to Just Like That …
Her scuffed velvet voice has lost none of its power in the intervening years, still capable of leaping and curling and smoldering and soaring as needed, matching her virtuoso slide guitar work, which was on ample display Sunday. The notes seemed to drip like honey, sticky and smeared, flung with a practiced joy across the stage.
The capacity crowd greeted Raitt with a standing ovation, the first of several over the course of the night. While the tempo deftly shifted from rowdy to contemplative and back again, the largely seated audience refrained from turning the Winspear into a loose, lively room, and kept its adulatory outbursts contained to the moments between songs.
Raitt’s briskly paced set list was a marvel of giving the customers what they came for (i.e., the “ones you know,” as Raitt cracked Sunday) and giving her and the band the side alleys and back roads they most longed to explore. There was also a frisky sense of escape in the air: Sunday’s performance was the band’s last on this leg of the tour, before resuming in mid-April.
Something to Sing About
It wasn’t that “Thing Called Love” or “Something to Talk About” were perfunctory, necessarily. Still, it did feel on Sunday as though Raitt and her band were a little more engaged with “Love Letter,” “Time of Our Lives” or even the gorgeous title track of 1989’s Nick of Time, her multi-platinum, Grammy-winning break-out. (Craftily, Raitt saved “I Can’t Make You Love Me” for the encore.)
Raitt was generous in ceding the spotlight to her collaborators, whether it was Levine firing off a solo, or welcoming former band member (and opening act) Jon Cleary back to the stage for a performance of his song “Unnecessarily Mercenary.” (Cleary, on keys, also stuck around for “Women Be Wise.”)
The long shadow of John Prine also hung over the evening, not least because Raitt, as she has so many nights before, doled out a genuinely shattering rendition of “Angel from Montgomery.” Prine also served as an emotional entry point to “Just Like That …,” a song Raitt said she didn’t get to play for him: “Losing him to COVID was one of the greatest heartaches I’ve known.”
A finely etched portrait of a woman torn asunder by the death of her child, “Just Like That …” seemed to stop time Sunday, as Raitt glowed in the spotlight, the air still as she sang of gloom receding: “I spent so long in darkness/Never thought the night would end/But somehow grace has found me.”
Allusions to the current moment’s inescapable rumblings of doom were scattered throughout the evening – “I wish I could fly away from this tortuous time, but we’re gonna put our shoulder to the wheel,” Raitt said before launching into Annie Lennox’s “Little Bird” – but she strived to keep the focus on the way time can accumulate joy, rather than sorrow.
Indeed, evidence of her longevity abounded Sunday – her former, long-time sound engineer, Paul “Pappy” Middleton, was in attendance – and Raitt, who moved between electric and acoustic guitar, as well as piano, was effusive in her gratitude to those assembled for her career.
“After 54 years of this, I would probably pay you to let us do this,” Raitt joked at one point. “Thank you for giving us this job for all these years.”
