Bonnie Raitt

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, y'all's justin Richmond. Today we have on the show Rock and Roll Hall of Famer the person who has one of my all time favorite singer songwriter albums, Bonnie Rate. She's a ridiculous guitarist, gorgeous singer, wonderful interpreter song and maybe even underrated as a songwriter herself. Bonnie was offered her first record deal as a college student in seventy one after a newsweek reporter saw her playing an early gig in Greenwich Village, but it took almost two decades before she peaked commercially. In eighty nine, her tenth album, Nick of Time, debuted at number one and earned three Grammys, including Album of the Year. She built on that success over the next five years with two more hit albums and even more top ten singles. In addition to her commercial success, Bonnie has been a devout advocate for preserving American blues music, bringing songs of the masses from little known but classic songwriters. On today's episode, Bruce Headlam talks to Bonnie Rate about her meticulous song selection process in the inspiration behind the tunes she wrote for her new album Just Like That. Bonnie also talks about a somewhat awkward dinner she had with Prince and how her slide guitar technique will forever be tied to giving her brother the finger. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Bruce Headlam and Bonnie Ray. Now, my wife is a huge she loves Broadway and she grew up with your father's recording of I think Carousel, the original cast recording. Yeah, yeah, so I admit I was just watching some clips of him on YouTube. First of all, you look a lot like him, my goodness, thank you. But he ever says that I have the same bump in my nose and we have a broad Scottish face. So he's extremely handsome. I didn't quite get that. But he's any any resemblance I'm really proud of. Well. Also, he had a good looking head of hair, as of course to you, thank you very much. Yeah, he all the way un till he was passed away. He had a lion's mane. Now my wife described him as he was Hugh Jackman, big strapping guy. Yep. Thank you for opening this interview paying tribute to him, because I'm such a I'm so grateful that I get to be his daughter, and my mom's too, who is his music director, but they he was nobody better as a leading man. We'll talk about you and then we'll come back to him. It's been six years since your last album. Yeah, what has that six years been like for you? Well? Working backwards, we had the little thing called a shutdown, so we couldn't get my band together, we couldn't tour. We had to cancel altogether four tours of my own and three with James Taylor in Canada. We kept postponing them and that was frustrating for somebody that's been on the road since I was twenty. And then I finally had a window when everybody was vaccinated and before the omicron surge in June and we flew out and it had been over two years since we played live, so I was really thrilled. So that took care of last year and the year before was just doing recordings from my house for various Democratic candidates and farm aide and gun control benefits and lots of musicians relief efforts, and you know, there was climate disasters that needed fundraising force. So I was able to be very busy but I missed cranking up my guitar and planted drums. And then before that we did a couple We did a year and a half with James opening for him and Arenas we double build. You know, sang a little bit on his set, he sang on mine. And before that I did my usual two year album tour with Digging Deep came out in twenty sixteen. It was a two year extension because of the COVID and I'm probably a two year extension to work with James. So is it Touring does not get tiring for you. You've done it so long, you do it so ferociously, it doesn't get old. Well, if I was keeping the same lifestyle I was the first seventeen years, I probably would have been flat on my back and not able to carry on the pace that I do. But as accommodation to being older, we do it. We do two shows in a row instead of three. Used to do three and then one off and two and then one off. So we do two on one off to rest my voice, texting an email has made it really better for saving my voice. I actually played a little bit longer show because I used to do a lot of fundraising receptions after the show too, which also wears out your voice. So I would say the touring part is fun to wake up in five cities a week, fun to have an opening night every night, to prove to the crowd that you're just as if not better than you were a last time, at least as good. And you know, I'm not gonna lie and say that it was. It's as fun as it was the first few decades when we could stay up and party and go to clubs and sit in with bands and act like fools. But it's really satisfying to play the shows. So the extra, the twenty two hours in between the shows is the challenge. But I've made it work for me as I you know, I do yoga, I talk to my friends. I'm not going to see as many of them on this tour, but you know, FaceTime and texting and all that has made it a lot more easy to be in touch with your loved ones. So it's not draining if you take care of yourself, and the bliss and the exaltation and the blast of energy and tribal connection and joy comes from the stage shows. So that I'd have to say that as the driving force and also making a living for twenty five people that would like to continue to pay their heating bill. To get together with your band and to get it to do this album? Is it a matter of gathering all the songs together first? What part of the process is that? Yeah, I mean I start calling songs down from ideas that I've saved over the years. There's certain songs on this record that have been resting and waiting. Do they have their day in court? And I look in earnest all the time. I'm always listening to maybe twenty or thirty songwriters that I really love the work of, some of whom are well known and others are more obscure. And I love the challenge of unearthing some unbelievably obscure jewel off of somebody's early records. So it's a song hunt that unearthed R and B chestnuts, current singer songwriters, old catalog from other artists, lots of publishing submissions, and some of my own. So you know, the process starts a couple of years before we actually get in the studio, and then, like the person that works on the term paper right before it's due, that's when I write my songs is right. When we go ready to go on the studio, I go, oh, I better finish this because I have really high standards and I don't make the cut off. And what do you look for in a song? Has it changed over the years. I'd like to say that it has changed, but not really. The main thing that is on my mind is not repeating myself. So finding something new to say at twenty one albums is musically and lyrically very challenging. So I've covered every aspect of broken love, longing for love, I'm excited to be in love, you know, all of that issue. And then there's some societal kind of songs, and there's just chestnuts from the blues and reggae and world music pantheon of our great artist that I love. So I just kind of want to make it fresh for myself and for my fans, and stretch a little bit and do some feels on the record that are going to add to my show when I go out on the road. I write my own songs kind of on assignment for what groove I'm missing and what topic I'm not covering yet. So I want to be I want to be new and interesting to myself, and I think that pays off for the fans too. I found your own songs on this record to be very different. Now, your last album had one of your favorite songs of mine, which is the Ones We Couldn't Be, which I think is just should be way way up there for you because it's a fantastic song, Thank You, Thank You. This is at least two of the songs are very very different though their narrative songs, and I can't remember you ever writing that kind of song before their storytellers songs. Yeah, I was just going to ask you first about the title track, which is just like that. Yeah. I deliberately wanted to do something different, like a story song. I mean quite quite a bit, inspired by my friend John Prine, and even before he passed away, I had come up with the ideas to do these two songs that are kind of acoustic and story songs. I remember being very moved by the gift of the Magi by O Henry when I was a kid, and I love telling stories that you have a twist a little bit in the ending, and I love reading those. I'm a big short story reader. But I found two incidents out in the world that really inspired these songs. And back in twenty eighteen, I saw a news program, evening News, that finished with a human interest segment, as they often do to balance the bad news with something hopeful, and that crew followed a woman knocking on the door of the gentleman that had received her son's heart as an organ donation, and they were capturing that on camera, and that was emotional enough, but he said, would you like to put your head on my chest and listen to your son's heart? And I lost it. I'm losing it now because it was so moving to me what that must have been like for both of those people. So I knew right then I was going to write a song about it. And I created a character that probably didn't even have any idea that her son organ was going to be donated. Normally have to get permission, but she was responsible for the death of her child and was so mortified when she came out of her whatever coomar or healing, she just left town and disappeared. And the song is about the recipient of her son's heart as a child spending twenty years trying to find her so he could share that with her that she gave him life, and she gave life to them both. It's interesting that you flipped it from the original story. You made the woman the person in the house who didn't know this was happening. Yeah, there's a lot of YouTube videos it turns out, of families meeting each other for the first time that received Yeah, I didn't know about it. You know, when something moves me that much. Was These are the first two songs I had to write for the record. And I knew that I had some other songs saved up that are we going to put in this time, But that song was just very powerful for me to write, and the idea of redemption and being able to finally have some grace and forgive yourself that you don't have to be going through having killed somebody accidentally in a car to feel that way. And it's all the ways that our lives are turned around by an act of grace and love from someone else. And I learned about it from Angel, from Montgomery and from Donald and Lydia, and you know, all the great story songs of Dylan's early records and Jackson Brown and so many others in the folk tradition. I'm really hoping that it resonates with people because it's it sure did with me. How is it different writing this kind of story song. First of all, you're doing some fingerpicking, which we don't often hear, which is lovely to hear. Did it start on the guitar? Did it start with the lyrics? How did you approach this song? Was it different? I wrote the lyrics when I came off the road and I had a break back in twenty nineteen in the winter, and I wrote both of this acoustic songs, and I knew that I was going to be on the guitar because I normally write the songs like the ones we Couldn't Be or All at Once, which is another story song that I wrote years ago. I think it's on luck of the draw. But I wrote the lyrics they were like they like people say. It's a bit of a cliche to say they kind of channeled through me, but that was I had a very kind of sacred intention with wanting to make this story real and I knew. I knew before I set the words down that it was going to end with this woman's life being changed. And it was fun painting in the details, you know, and just making it just right. Because I don't write that often, so it was very satisfying. At no time was I under pressure. I waited to put the music until right before the album, and that is when playing the fingerpicking style, which I knew I was going to do this song. And because I love Jackson's records and John Prine's first album like his others, but his first album is an absolute masterpiece. And it just shows the power of hearing Bob Dylan and Joan Baez when I was a kid and picked up the guitar, and just the power of a voice in one guitar, and I played that music and John Prine was in my heart when I was writing that song. We should talk a bit about your musical background. If you came from a musical family, your mother pianist, your father this Broadway star. What did you get from each of them in terms of music? I would say that because they were a partnership. She helped select his material for his concerts, She helped get his clothes together, he had, you know, they were golfing partners. He was his rehearsal pianist, his music director, and directed the orchestra with her head playing the piano at his concerts, so I hear them together, giving me the joy of music. Both my brothers and I sitting there just in the other rooms of the house listening to my dad warm up and then practice songs for different functions that he was going to be doing, either light opera or the Broadway shows he was about to do, to practice to get used to those or his concerts. So we got a wide range of everything from Frank Sinatra to Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett to Ella Fitzgerald to Mahela Jackson to classical music. So I got the love of a wide range of music from both my folks exposing us to it at a very young age. So my mom was also a really good singer, and I wanted to play piano like she did, and took lessons for five years, and I just gave up because my teacher wouldn't let me play pop songs and I really wanted to play Motown and Beatles songs, and so I would do that at home and then lag behind when I was supposed to play my classical piece for him. So I jettisoned the piano and picked up the guitar, which I had started to learn when I was about nine years old because I emulated my camp counselors. Every summer Moll my dad was in summer Stock, we would go to this camp in the Adirondacks the way from La to Adderdics and the counselors were caught up in the folk revival of the sixties, so Joan Bayez, Pete Seeger, Peter Paul, and Mary King Centrio Odetta. Those were heroes to me, and I taught myself to play off those records, which I begged for it Christmas, along with my guitar. So I was a little folky and ended up getting more interested in the guitar after I didn't take guitar lessons with By then, I had sort of enjoyed picking things out by ear, and so I got my love of the instrument from my mom and my love of singing probably from my dad. It's interesting you sort of combine them because you're a performer like your dad, but like your mother, you're constantly on the lookout for the right song. You're the manager at the same time. Yeah, and you've helped a lot of songwriters careers by looking for these things. That's a treasure for me because I happened to love the songwriter's original demos of the songs they give me, I have a whole collection of them, but some of them wouldn't have the kind of a voice that would get a record deal. So I feel like I have an obligation to be able to make these beautiful pieces of music sing and exposed to a broader audience. I mean not only opening doors for them as a in their career, but I mean I can't imagine being such a talented songwriter and have nobody hear your tune. So you know, I come from the Judy Collins, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra's school of interpreting other people's material and making it my own. But you're also write, Yeah, you're reminding me because I grew up in southern Ontario and Shirley Ikart used to I was too young, but my sister used to go see her. So she was an example of someone whose career you really made. Yeah, and she had a pretty good I think she had a pretty good following in Canada and she's still making it. She was still making wonderful records. But yeah, that song that she wrote kind of changed my life. But you don't sing it correctly because it's it's really something to talk about. Oh, oh, there you go. Canadians don't understand your version at all. And she didn't sing like that on the demo either, so there you go. No, that would be a very limited audience if she sang like that. Yeah, just Canadians, and there's not that many of us. I have a Canadian in my band now. He's from Winnipeg originally, but he lives in Nova, Scotia, Glenn Patcha, and he is a secret weapon of this new album. He's just an incredibly soulful keyboard player but a great singer as well. So I'm a big, big fan of Canadian musicians and comedians. We'll be right back with more from Bonnie Rate than Bruce Head Them. After a break, we're back with more from Bonnie Rate and Bruce Headlam. So was there one particular song that you listen to or you played in the guitar that sort of said to you, I want this to be my life? You know, I was plaintively playing all those joan by his songs, all my trials, everything on her first couple of albums Odetta's songs, and then I just felt hard for Bob Dylan. Taught myself to play all of those in my room and sang so earnestly, with absolutely no desire or need to play for other people. I mean, I led the songs are on the campfire at camp As an assistant counselor, I'd help put on the talent shows on Saturday nights with kids doing musicals. But playing music for me was just a solitary, wonderful emotional outlet. And I just loved the sound that the guitar makes when it's in your lap and through the sound hole and singing and playing it's just so such a release and you go so deep. So I can't really say there was one tune that made me want to go do it for a living. But one of the best inspirations was I took a semester off from college, and my folks said, Okay, you're on your own or not supporting you if you take a semester off. So I got to get a job, and I worked for the American Friend Service Committee as a transcriptionist in Philadelphia. And I went to a club and I saw some young folk singer, a woman opening for the main act at a little tiny club called a second front, and I said, you know what, I could be doing this instead of typing. You know, I like the AFSC, but come on, how much is she getting paid? So I found out I could just make pin money and support myself, and that's how my career took off. It wasn't really a desire to become a musical powerhouse or have a career in music. I was always going to be a social activist and it kind of fell into my lap just because I happen to have the inspiration of seeing this girl that's I said. But if she can do that, I can do I'm at least that good, you know. And did you make as much money as you would have as a translator? Oh, I think I've done a little bit better than I've been a better social activist as well, I had more reach. But yeah, I mean right off the bat, I was very lucky to be dating somebody that was also a manager of some great blues artists that it's the Great Sunhouse, Mississippi jo Unhurt and then Mississippi Fred McDowell, who I got to meet and hang out with all these legendary blues guys, which is why I took a semester off because a lot of them were elderly, and I knew they weren't going to live forever and I could always go back to college. So I had a kind of an opening slot with a lot of these little gigs. And you know the gas lad I opened for Fred mcdowellan and my hero John Hammond, and I had no expectation to have the guy from Newsweek come down and give me a review. And next thing I know, I was getting record deal offers. Wow. So nobody more surprised than my folks and me. Was that your first exposure to blues music? No. I became a complete blues fan at fourteen when I Joan by his Vanguard Records was like mecca for me. You know, So anything on Vanguard I wanted to listen to. And the Blues at Newport sixty four had Reverend Gary Davis, John Lee Hooker, John Hammond, Dave Van Ronk, n McGee, Sonny Terry, the Great Mississippi, John Hurt, and Reverend Gary Davis. It was a great record, and I taught myself to play. I'd never heard anything like John Hurt. I didn't know white guys could sing the blues. And I was a huge fan of Chuck Barry, Little, Richard Pat's Domino and Ray Charles. So I was already in the R and B soul music lane like the Beatles were in the Rolling Stones. And when the Stones turned, everybody onto Muddy Waters and how and Wolf. I signed up really just like the rest of us. You know, Now, when did the slide guitar start for you? I was about fifteen. I had heard about bottle like guitaris to read sing Out magazine. I didn't have income to be able to go buy records or because I didn't take guitar lessons. I did know though, that the that you tuned the guitar to an open tuning because my grandpa taught me some hymns on a Hawaiian lap steel, and he said, all you have to do is move the bar, you know, from this position to this and you get the four cord in the five corner. It's a cake. So I soaked the label off a chorused and cold bottle to put on my middle finger, which is not actually very practical for slide, and I just tried to imitate what I heard on the records. When I was about fourteen or fifteen years old, including Little Red Rooster by the Rolling Stones. Now we should say bb King said you were the best, I think, the best damn slide player around. So you've got lots of ploddeds. Yeah, I can. I can go to my grave with that one right there. I mean, if I never got another review, that was the one that I was not expecting any treasure. And you mentioned you use the slide of your second finger, which is not unheard of, but it's unusual. Yeah, it's not optimum because actually it's great to be able to finger the other parts of the chords when you're not just playing the slide, you know, So it's it's it's more limiting. But I had never seen anyone do it in La. I grew up in La and we used what we call flip the bird all that time when I was a tough little tomboy and I had older brother, and I would do this this particular position with my hand, which isolate your middle finger, and that's the finger that seemed really natural to me to put the slide on. And in fact you hold I won't make that finger, but you hold the bottleneck on in the position that's actually the position I'm talking about so well, we've now discovered the secret of you or great slide work flipping the bird to your brother, which I showcased on the David Frost Afternoon Show, my first show ever on TV. My bass player of freebo and I like in seventy two or something like that, and Robert Klein was the guest host, and I had opened for him at a university show and he played harmonic as everybody knows. He had a great bit about I can't stop my leg and a spoof on being a blues guy, and he asked me about it, and I remember being smart alecky and I was holding my finger like that the whole time in this day even Frost show. And then I went home and asked my friends if they saw it. They went, oh, yeah, I can't believe you did that. Ah youth. Yeah, you surprised yourself by getting a record deal and then you had these critically lauded albums through the seventies. Tell me what was that time like for you. I was having a blast. I mean I built my following from opening for my heroes and folk clubs to being on festivals and being on the one or the opening act at three o'clock and next thing, and as back, eventually being asked a headline a couple of nights, and then I drew poorly, and then I drew better, and then I would open for Cat Stevens or James Taylor, and you know the benefit of having someone manage and booked me that was already had acts that he could just call up. And I was cheap, you know. I played my own guitar, didn't need a band. I played a little blues, I played a little folk music, so I was not threatening to the main act. And next thing, you know, I was building my own following so slow and steady. I got the record deal that came out. I couldn't afford a band till after my third album, and it was really touring most of the time to build up my following, and mostly in colleges. So I'm feeling the harvest of that, all that legwork and giving up personal life, you know, time at home, because people are still coming to see me, you know, five decades later, and a lot of them write letters and say I saw you at Case Western Reserve in nineteen seventy six or I was you know, I was in the audience in Schwanksville, Pennsylvania. And you know, all of these people that spent their twenties and thirties, they've stayed loyal with me. So my recollection of that time is six albums in seven years and ten months on the road. Wow, and one woman and a bunch of guys. And I was like Gidget. You know, they told Gidget she couldn't surf, and she was eventually accepted by the guy's community. And I felt that way about being a leader of a band and playing lead guitar. I don't think of you as a Gidget type. Maybe a gidget who's flipping off everybody. Yeah, I went from Gidget when I was thirteen, or Soda Amanda Blake I thought was really great because she had red hair and she didn't have to get married and she owned a saloon, so that I was not lost on me. I went, you know what, I'm not the wife and mother type, but I'm just gonna It was a dream come true to be handed a career like that, and I've never had a day where I don't know how lucky I am. You also showcased some female composers earlier in your career. People who don't have a big following now like Sippy Wallace and Yvonne Blake and clips Arose. Was that delivered on your part? Was this something that interested you about blues history? Well? To me as a blues fan, the classic blues singers were just all fantastic and so different. But I loved that Sippy wrote songs from kind of a as a young feminist in my early twenties, you know, in that late lateeen to hear you can make me do what you want to do. But you got to know how, you know, it was just so saucy and women be wise, keep your mouth shut, don't advertise your man. You know, all the feminists were going. You know, how could you say that sisters would never steal each other's man? I said, what what world are you living in? You know? You know, if you talk about your baby, you tell me he's so fine. Don't be surprised if I come up check him out sometime. You know. So Sippy, I had no idea that she was still alive, and so to actually record her songs because I loved her music above all the classic blues singers and find out that she was alive and become friends with her at the ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival and go on and tour together for fifteen years. It was just an incredible gift. So, you know, something that I had an intention, it was musically driven, ended up being a benefit culturally for me and for her just to expose her to a wider, wider audience. And that is a great joy for me to take people that are under a shaded I mean, Clypso music is one of my other favorites and Clipso Rose is a huge star in that world. And Van Dyke Parks is the one that turned me onto that song. So on the record, I was working with him in Little George and you know we did that song. What's she going to do? If I can't repeat it here? But there's a little bit of some double untender lyrics, as it often is in the blues and Clypso music. What was Sippy Wallace like? What was she like as a person. She had an incredibly great laugh which she loved to laugh, left a kid around, but she was very religious. And you know I was meeting on her sixties or late sixties. She had recovered from a stroke and she was you had been in a wheelchair for a while, but was walking slowly, and she was only going to do gospel music after she stopped. You know, the whole blues industry went downhill when there was the depression and the Second World War. They needed the vinyl for other things, and the black music industry was the one that took the hit. So she really was settled on this plane. In church, she played organ and piano in the church and led the choir. And she heard that I had done one of her songs, and her manager, who had kind of brought her out of retirement and nursed her back to you know, the idea of playing in public again after her stroke. She was only going to do a gospel song at the anne of her Blues and Jazz festival, and I was going to pay tribute to her. And then we rehearsed it in my trailer. We were soprano, saxophone, and my guitar singing her own song, and she started to rock back and forth, and she said, well, maybe I'll just do that one. So she was playful and wise, and I asked her lots of questions about men, about what it was like to be on the road when she was a young woman with mostly men. I mean, did she get hit on? Did they treat her with respect? What was it like to be widowed by her husband dying so relatively early? And did she miss being married? And you know, I asked her about Jesus and asked her about racism and Jim Crow, And it was an incredible to have her as my kind of like a grandmother or an elderly aunt, to give me a window on her world musically and culturally. Did it help you in those years when you were the woman on the road usually opening for men and I'm sure getting hit on? And well, I was just my own boss, you know. I grew up with my dad having to my dad mostly waiting to get another show. I mean, would he would steady book himself in the summertime on the very lucrative one star at touring in Carrousel, Oklahoma, Pajama game shows that there there's a circuit of regional theater in the summer, it's called summer Stock, And he would do eight shows a week and for three months and just be out there no air conditioning. Most of them are intense in the round. But basically he didn't have a chance to get a new He couldn't generate a new show for himself. And I just noticed that, and I said, you know what I'm gonna If I'm gonna do this, I want to have total control over what I record and when I released the record, and what the ticket prices will be, and you know who I opened for and who opens for me. And so I was much more hands on self managing. You know, I needed a booking agent and a tour manager, but the rest of it I handled. So I think Sippy was more of a woman of her time. She was very young when she started, and then I think guys just took care of her, you know, the guys, the music directors, but they were always very respectful. She didn't have I think she probably got married early to be able to be protected. You talked about sort of being in control of your own career, but then in the eighties your career took this well, I'm not sure your career even took a dive. Maybe record companies just changed their ways. But Warner Brothers dropped you at the same time that I think Prince was interested in working with you. Well within a few years later. Yeah, I mean answer, I kind of veered off when you asked me how I felt about the seventies and my albums. You know, I would have liked to have them promoted more. I mean, we always went out of my way to have a good single on the record, But I think because I didn't have a manager and I didn't want to be directed at all or told what to wear, and I didn't care about having a hit single. I mean, my deal with Warners was predicated on being an album artist. So it's something that an Americana music now it's just not even thought of. You know, if you straddle genres and you know you don't want to have a you don't need to have a commercial single off your record. That's people don't even blink now. But back then they wanted you to be able to promote a record. And when the record business took off with Rumors and Thriller in Miami, Vice Soundtrack, these were billion selling records and those of us that were more moderate sellers just got pushed a little bit to the side and they'd rather sign somebody else that could bring in a more bang for their buck. They were also absorbed big corporations, you know, Warner elector Atlantic, consolidated, Warner Communications took over. There was a different set of priorities in the eighties, so you know, they dropped t Bone Burnett and Van Morrison and Arlo Guthrie and me, and you know, we weren't bringing in the big bucks. So the eighties weren't real friendly to my kind of music. It wasn't a great political decade. There was this war in Central America. It was alert to the right politically and the consolidation of the record business, and it wasn't until the end of the decade that the college radio and album oriented rock and VH one came along. And you know, Tracy Chapman had a number one record, Edie Brickell, Robert Cray, the Fabulous Thunderbirds. My kind of music was having hit a hit play, so I would it was a good time for me to come back into the four but I never expected to have that huge success. I don't think anybody did. But you were back playing solo shows, is that right? You didn't have a band at that point. I played with my guitar player who backed up on bass and sang harmony, and we would do that in the months when we weren't with the band in the summer and Prince approached me a couple of years after I'd been dropped because I had a record ready to come out and a tour with Stevie Ray Vaughan, I had to cancel it, and he said, you know you were treated badly, why don't you come over with Paisley Park and make a record with me? And we ended up trying to work on some things together, but he had done the tracks all of himself in a key that I don't sing in and lyrics that I couldn't relate to. So we were going to work together again in the future, but our schedules just didn't work out. Was he a nice guy to work with despite everything being in the wrong key. He was really as fascinating as you read about him. He's very shy, you know, when he ate dinner with him, he was like, I felt uncomfortable because I'm pretty extroverted and he was just really self conscious about looking down at his food and putting the food in his mouth. So it was kind of endearing. But what a badass though. You know. It was just the combination of shy and sexually so forthright, and you know the thing that all of us musicians have in common is our love of music. So that's what we just every time that we got together was a couple of long evenings in LA and once in Minneapolis, just huge floor to ceiling screens watching this. You know, Staples Singers and Sly and the family Stone. I mean, we just were Stone music fans, and that's what we had in common. He was a great, great guy. Did you ever just sit across from him and play guitar? I played guitar on some of the tracks that he had put together for us to poss for me to try, and so I did that, but it was a thwarted It wasn't a fully realized collaboration because I told him I appreciated the interest, but I wanted to be fifty fifty and and there's some things happen were you know, I was injured and I had to get over a thumb injury. So we had to postpone the sessions, and so he went ahead and just got some songs from his vault or wrote some songs that he thought I would relate to, but they just weren't in my wheelhouse. So, you know, just I wish we could have worked together because I had great admiration for him. We have to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more from Bonnie Ray. We're back with the rest of Bruce's conversation with Bonnie Ray. I do want to talk about some of the songwriters you've worked with and just your first encounters, and I have to start with John Prine. Can you tell me about meeting him or encountering his songs for the first time. Yeah. I heard his first album on Atlantic, his debut record, and I was just absolutely floored. And I don't know when in the timeline, but I was playing the Gaslight and he was playing The Bitter End, And we ended up meeting in New York City in the village, and soon after we both played the Philadelphia Folk Festival together, and we just forged a friendship right away that was absolutely immediate. He was a fan of mine, I was a fan of his. Who was Angel the first song you did his? Yes, I knew of the first time I heard that song on his album, that I'd be cutting that song, and I just just astonished that someone of his age could crawl inside that woman who in that long time marriage and just so beautifully and succinctly. I mean, he's so much has been written, especially since he passed, But I mean the masterpiece of economy of that song, and how every line is just laden with meaning and you don't need to go in. It doesn't have to be a long story. It's just immediately there. And I sing that song for all the women when I was a young woman, for all the women that are stuck in marriages and can't leave if they wanted to try a different kind of life, or get a job, or have someone to talk to, just not I remember seeing the film The Bridges of Madison County and thinking that so perfectly described what Angel from Montgomery was about without giving it away, that moment when she makes a decision to not follow her bliss. So I sing the song for my mom's generation. I sing the song for women around the world that don't have the choice to get stay single, or get out of a bad marriage, or get an education. So it's taken on very mythic proportions for me. Another writer I wanted to ask you about was Richard Thompson. Oh, I'm so glad he's another guy that how could he write that dimming of the day in his early twenties. You know, give me a break. He's one of the greatest ones we have. I'm a huge fan of his, and he's as fascinating a person. He has a wonderful memoir that he just put out, and it's really his Sufi religion, his path going to the Sufi spirituality. Mixed in with all of it, the wonderful behind the scenes of what it was like to be creating an entirely new form of music by electrifying and making originals of Celtic traditions. It's just there's nobody like him. He's absolutely brilliant. You know. It's one of my fantasies that you do an entire album of Richard Thompson songs. What a cool idea, you know, down where the Drunkard's roll or walking on the wire, misunderstood persuasion. I mean, there's so many that I love. You could do fifty two vincent black Lightning from the point of view the woman. Oh my god, that would be very original. That would be mighty, wouldn't it. I mean, it's a woman with red hair and a motorcycle. I don't I'd have to sing about a guy with a black hair on the motorcycle, but you could do it anyway you want it. That's my elevator, pitch Well suggested, because I just think he's phenomenal and he keeps growing and he's so a thick and if it was just his songwriting, that would be enough to put him in the top. But his singing style and his topics and his guitar playing, I mean, really thank you for reminding me to so I could just live in that moment with him. And you're a big Mose Allison fan. I am a huge Mose Allison fan. Now have you done a lot of his songs? Or I've only done Everybody's Crying Mercy? I did that on my third album in seventy three, and I had become a headliner. I first opened for Jackson Brown my first national tour in seventy four, one woman in thirteen guys in both bands on one bus. It was fifty cities of that. It was incredible. But after that I was able to headline and I invited Tom Waits to come and open the tour. So and somewhere in there I asked Mose Allison if he would like to do It was either three or six weeks together, probably three of colleges, and I know it was an unusual idea, but he I said, Mose, you know we could, You could make good money. I'll give you, I'll pay you more than what you're asking, and you can open up this whole market that needs to know about you. And he said yes, so selfishly. Just to be able to sit in the wings and listen to him every night, it was incredible and we were very good friends all the way through his life. I hear ideas of his sometimes in your music, including on this album, but other than the one song I Know You Haven't you haven't covered him. My older brother brought a record of his one. You know how you idolize your siblings sometimes when they're older. And he was dating someone from Bennington College and we came back to Christmas vacation and he brought the Birds and Freddie Hubbard and John Lee Hooker and later Jimmy Hendrix, but he brought Mose Allison's record. That's where I first heard it. I was like sixteen, and I just couldn't wait to be a beatneck and go to New York and hang out with guys with turtlenecks and berets and goatees, and I just think Mose is the coolest blues guy I've ever heard in my life. Incredible. So the eighties, your career, or Warner's career wasn't going so well, let me put it that way, and then you had this incredible tear when you went to Capital and they signed you for some small deal for one hundred and fifty thousand or something, not even that one hundred twenty five I think. But all we needed was the budget. That was the budget we were going to make the record with. Well, that was the best one hundred twenty five thousand dollars Capitol Records ever spent. Well what did they know? I mean, they knew that if we were going to make a really simple record that it doesn't cost you know, I just make records live mostly, it doesn't shouldn't cost that much to make. I don't do big productions or anything. And Joe Smith signed me to Warners in seventy one, and he signed me to Capitol and eighty eight, So that was part of it. But to have a new label, some of which are people that some of the people came over from Warners with Joe, but they had something to prove. They knew that I was really changing my life and wanting to make a really great record, and my pairing with Don was was real kismet. It was great. What else changed you think that made it suddenly possible for people to hear you in a different way. Well, Number one, I think it was a switch and label and have a very enthusiastic team that had something to prove. H one and was just starting. And I would have never been played on MTV because I was forty years old so and not a babe. So VH one needed some new artists to showcase their new adult channel. You know, I don't know. You can't call it an adult channel. What can you call it mature? I don't know what it could call it. It's just not the kids channel. I think the fact that I got sober and eighty seven and was much healthier and happier and had written some songs, and you know, I had a particularly good batch of tunes and a great partner and Don was and all of those things coupled with the fact that radio actually had formats that would play me. That is a huge change from the middle of the eighties and before. There's no way that Tracy Chapman would have won Album the Year in nineteen eighty one, or eating Eatie Brickell or the Thunderbirds or Robert Cray having big hit records like that. So things have changed and the burgeoning American I'm seen kind of what was happening right about that time. Are there still outlets that are going to play your new stuff, that are going to say, here's the new bonny rate? Yes, I think so, I mean there's only I mean, I don't get mainstream play. I don't think at all. I've only had a couple of songs that crossed over in the in that Nick of Time period with I Can't Make You Love Me and have a Heart maybe, And I think Thing called Love was a radio hit, but only on the adult album are adult oriented radio whatever, there's AC and AC light, adult content, adult contemporary light. Those stations that would play Nick of Time wouldn't play Thing called Love and vice versa. And I think nowadays there's tremendous competition, not just for styles of music, but four generations of music. I mean, every four years is another thirty artists that are vying for the same radio time. So I'm thank god I got my foot in the door in the nineties because I'm still played as a legacy artist on You know, I don't really study the formats of the stations that play me, but I just know that there's independent what we call FM stations that have been incredibly loyal to me and probably get a little play on college stations and maybe even country stations. I don't know, but there's a circuit that plays me just like they played John Hyatt, John Prine, Jackson Brown. Thank God. It's a little bit wildering to me that I mentioned the song off your last album with the ones we Couldn't Be, which, you know, to me, I don't see any reason why that's not as big a hit as I Can't Make You Love Me. Oh my gosh. You know, no one's ever mentioned that song really, really no. I mean, I'm very proud of it, but it's I just figured it's too personally, you know. I have a three or four songs like that that are on the keyboard and kind of contemplative, you know, not universal themes, but very personal, and they probably don't have the production or the musical style to cross over and be a single like that. I mean, there's a beautiful song called Wounded Hard. A couple of albums before that I thought was just a massive deepening for everybody to listen to. It's by Jude Johnston. But thank you for appreciating that. I just I wish in a perfect world that those every ballad could have a lot of showcase. So you've continued to put out albums great album since, like Fundamental and slip Stream, which I think did very very well for you. How was this new album different for you? Obviously the world was different. Yes, with COVID, was there a different thought going into this record? It's always the same for me. I find a ten or twelve best songs I can find and write some that say things that I can't find from other people. And I've got the same focus of looking for new things to say and new ways to say it and stretch if I can, and have a couple of surprises for people. So it wasn't really different. It's just we just had to wait a long time before I could get in the studio, and you know, there was no assurance that this year was going to actually the tour that we booked a year ago for this year. We didn't have any idea, and I guess we still don't know if it's going to one hundred percent happened, but it looks pretty good. So I called up May the Staples, and I called up Lucinda Williams, and I said, would you be my special guests? So the tour is kind of split with them, each one of them doing a different part, and the sales have been great so far. So going into this record, I just knew that I wanted to stretch a little bit and do those acoustic songs that are not about my personal life. And I also wanted to write a song about recovery, and just not just recovery, but the way the devil is on your shoulder trying to urge you to do the things that you know you shouldn't do, and what a slippery slope that is and musically waiting for you to blow, which is the music to that idea. That has some of the more adventurous musical arranging that I've ever come up with, So I'm proud of I'm especially proud of that one. And then Living for the Ones is the song I wanted to write about what we just went through in the last couple of years and all the people that we've lost. So I got a little bit of everything that I needed to say in there. Okay, we are anticipating all my questions, which is good. No, No, that's absolutely fine. But I do want to ask you about the other slower song, the story song on this which was down the hall. Tell me a bit about that. Well, that one was great journalism by the New York Times. Again, the Sunday magazine has some of the most incisive, unexpected stories, and I make room in my life to read cover to cover unless I'm too blown out by reading about war and poverty and starvation on a Sunday morning. So I saw this photo essay and a beautiful article in the New York Times magazine Sunday paper in May of twenty eighteen, and I just was devastated. When I finished, I just wept. I put it down and I just wept. And I don't even know if I went outside again that day. And it continued to stay with me and moved me so deeply, and I knew that it was going to be what I wanted to write a song about. And it had to do with a prison hospice program where in Vacaville, California. They have a program where volunt prisoners can volunteer to be of service on the hospice board. And the photos that accompanied the interviews and the writing of Seleca's incredible writing for the piece, which was one of the most beautiful marriages of journalism and heart and human interest and redemption and grace, and those are the things that in the last couple of years, with the wrenching polarity and vitriol and climate nightmare and suffering and migration and black lives matter, it's unprecedented and I don't know how to handle it. So I was really moved by the impact of this story, and I knew I wanted to write a song from the point of view of someone I would make that decision that, you know, for no gain, no shortening of his sentence, no money. Just saw a guy being wheeled into the hospice ward and asked the nurse if his family he comes in at the end, and she said most of them don't have anybody, and he just, you know, what else has he got to do? He didn't have to volunteer it. I just put myself in his place and what it would be like for him to get over the tribal segregation and animosity of one population in the prison community has for the other, and they in the hospital. Word, everybody's the same. We all need human contact and love and care and someone to be with us at the end. And I just wanted to be able to write songs, these two songs about redemption and grace and forgiveness, and I think it's medicine for these difficult times and they're beautiful songs. Thank you so much for talking. Thank you, Thank you for appreciating what I do and making these great suggestions as well. Thanks the Bonny Rate for talking about the inspiration behind her new album Just like that. You can hear a new album and all of our favorite Bonnie Rate songs on my playlist at broken record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel YouTube dot com slash broken record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help from Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel, Bent, Holiday, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafee. Our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content an uninterrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions, and if you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.