The music isn't called just blue. It's the blues; it holds a hundred shades of misery and ecstasy. And Bonnie Raitt, the show-biz baby who went to Radcliffe and looks like Meryl Streep's grittier sister, finds those shades in her songs. She wears tinges of folk and rock, country and pop, but her regular outfit is multihued blue. She makes it so smart that when she sings it, it's everyone's favorite color.
Raitt knows the blues is gut music, halfway between groin pulse and heartbeat. The trick, or the wisdom, is to embrace those sexual and spiritual polarities. That's Raitt's strength. In a single phrase her voice can skip from sweet to rowdy, as if she were sipping church-social lemonade one moment and gargling rotgut the next. Meanwhile, her handsome slide-guitar work instantly sets a song's mood. Over the course of the 12-song set on her fine new album, Longing in Their Hearts, Raitt takes you to hell and heaven and safely back home, wherever you live.
By now -- she's 44 and hitting the quarter-century mark in a career that flowered into stardom in 1989 with her multiplatinum, multi-Grammy-winner Nick of Time -- Raitt has lived in most of the places she sings about. She has raised hell and been nearly crushed by it. The authority she puts into a lament called Circle Dance ("After a while I learned that love/ Must be a thing that leaves") didn't come from convent life. But the nights of high- wire partying are now song fodder; in one of her new tunes she sings, "Sometimes I miss that feeling of falling/ Falling on over the edge."
Is there any future after such a fall? Not for some pop stars, whose recklessness has meant an early death. But Raitt's path led to maturity -- and no sentimental rue. "It's hard to become a responsible, mature adult," she says. "Sometimes we all want to drive way too fast or never come back to our family or just be out of control. Yeah, I miss the wilder days of youth. But do I miss staying up all night and getting messed up? No."
In the Hollywood hotel room where Raitt is chatting, a visitor watches her search for missing car keys and asks if she belongs to the Automobile Association of America. That prompts a sassy, alto laugh: "These days I belong to A.A. and the Triple A. I'm pretty disgustingly healthy. I'm a vegetarian, I don't eat dairy, I work out. My vice is torturing myself. My mind is my own trap. It is not easy to be awake with this brain all the time."
Maybe not, but it must be an adventure. It has been from the start, when Raitt was born in Burbank, California, to John Raitt, robust tenor of Broadway (Carousel) and Hollywood (The Pajama Game), and his wife Marge. The Raitts were Quakers -- no movieland socialites. Bonnie attended Quaker camps and then Radcliffe College. It's unlikely that inside many Cliffies a singing sharecropper struggles to burst out, but Raitt had been touched by John Lee Hooker, Sippie Wallace and other emissaries from the delta. In 1970 she left school to sing the blues.