Bonnie Raitt
Vicar Street, Dublin
★★★★☆
“Ireland in any weather is beautiful to me,” Bonnie Raitt says, telling Vicar Street about the nine-day break she took here, surrounded by sheep, before playing Belfast on Sunday night. The rest surely did her good, because she’s in rare form in Dublin on Tuesdsay.
She hits an early highlight with the rattling, barrelhouse groove of Thing Called Love, a song originally on John Hiatt’s Bring the Family. That album featured the slide guitar of Ry Cooder, but even he’d have to bow to Raitt’s playing as she tosses off an effortless swamp porch solo, knife blade sharp and smooth as molasses, from the battered Stratocaster she apparently bought for $120 back in 1969.
She’s got the voice to go with it. Take Mabel John’s 1966 classic Your Good Thing (Is About to End). Raitt, brimming with pleading soul, stretches out vowels, holds notes until her vibrato is on the verge of cracking, and when that voice has finally had enough of the uncaring man in the lyric, her slide guitar takes over to show him the door.
An almost supernaturally intuitive interpreter of songs, Raitt delivers an achingly beautiful take on Richard Thompson’s Dimming of the Day and a called-for Angel of Montgomery by John Prine (“Nobody cut through like John”), then twists Bob Dylan’s Million Miles inside out with a glint in her eye as she implores her baby to “rock me for a couple of months”. Then she bests them all by bringing the house to its feet with the encore’s I Can’t Make You Love Me, a tale of broken love familiar to every knocked-about heart.
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Raitt makes several bows to her old friend Paul Brady, who is in the audience, having the same good time as the rest of us. First she claims she’s nervous with him watching, then declares it an honour. When asked to sit in, he allegedly replied, “You can’t afford me,” but with the greatest respect to the man from Strabane, she doesn’t need him as she commandeers his Not the Only One and Steal Your Heart Away, making them her own.
Raitt calls her show ‘a healing experience in this suffering, hard-assed world’ and that’s what it is
But Raitt also knows how to write a song. Nick of Time, the title track from the 1989 album that finally made her an overnight success 18 years after her debut, is one thing with its great lyric about getting on a bit (“Those lines are pretty hard to take when they’re staring back at you”). Just Like That is something else entirely.
To the surprise of many, including the other nominees and Raitt herself, she won the Grammy for Song of the Year with it a few years back, but the judges were right for once. A woman who lost her son is visited by the man who lives on thanks to her child’s transplanted heart. It’s moving on record, but it’s devastating live.
In that inexplicable way a song you’ve heard before can sneak back up on you, Raitt gets to the line where she lies her head on his chest and she’s with her boy again – and you’re gutted by the lyric’s power. “They say Jesus brings you peace and grace. Well, he ain’t found me yet,” has a similar effect.
Raitt calls her show “a healing experience in this suffering, hard-assed world”, and that’s what it is, whether she and her superlative four-piece band are transforming the room into a rambunctious roadhouse or a hushed confessional. A night of welcome warmth and real soul. There aren’t many like her.
