Monday, December 12, 2005

First-Raitt Bonnie Blues

Another "Hail to the Crone!" Bonnie Raitt (b.1949) was in concert at Altanta's Tabernacle venue last evening to a sold-out crowd. And we got to hear her! Her story is like so many other musicians who got into drug and alcohol abuse and then came clean, but also unlike others in that she's a nine-time Grammy winner and has just released her 18th album, Souls Alike.

"After this many albums and hundreds of songs," she says, "you want to find new things to say, new ways to say them. For me, one of the most exciting aspects of what I do is hearing some hidden part of myself reflected back in the songs of someone else. It's why that connection to artists we love is so deep. And then the alchemy of the band and I finding a way to make these songs our own—that's what keeps me coming back. Like prisms reflecting back on each other, we're souls alike."
How do you even start to talk about artists like this who have a lifetime of colored, lime-lighted history behind them! Artists who find their Soul and share it on stage with a community of musicians they've attracted to themselves. Artists not selfish with the limelight who have global interests and causes much bigger than themselves.

This is one redheaded Crone who knows how to sing the Blues, whether about the hurricane disaster in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the gas wars, or personal relationships!

(So very Soulful to this redheaded crone who sang along with her.)

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