Adele, Katy Perry and Bon Iver all love her songs, but she never wanted to be a pop star Sometimes, just sometimes, the good ones win out. Ask Bonnie Raitt. In a career now into its fifth decade, and which once appeared to be in terminal free fall, the US singer-guitarist is enjoying a remarkable upsurge in popularity. And credibility. The success of her latest album, Slipstream, which landed her a 10th Grammy and was last year’s biggest-selling blues record, was topped with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americana Music Association. Then there are the famous fans. Bon Iver, Katy Perry, Dave Grohl and Adele are among her admirers, the latter’s live shows regularly making room for an aching cover of I Can’t Make You Love Me. “It’s fantastic!” enthuses Raitt, with an almost childlike air of incredulity. “Katy Perry thinks I’m cool. John Mayer had given her a gift of these old records of mine and she said she did some three-hour hike up a volcano, listening only to all my deep album cuts from the 1970s. It makes me feel honoured that people I admire so much, like Adele and Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), come up and say I’ve influenced them.” The 63-year-old Raitt is a prime example of the slow build. Arriving on the music scene at the dawn of the 1970s, her first flurry of albums — from 1971’s self-titled debut to Sweet Forgiveness in 1977 — were rootsy gems that presented a shape-shifting gallery of guises, from bottleneck blues mama to folk balladeer to country-soul stirrer. None of them sold in startling quantities, yet Warner Bros. allowed her creative freedom. “I said ‘I don’t want to be a singles artist and I don’t want to change what I look like,’” recalls Raitt, tucked into the nook of a chic hotel bar in South Kensington. “‘I’m not that beautiful and I don’t want to be a pop star. I won’t take any advance money, but just let me have complete control of when I put it out, who I’m gonna work with and what the songs are. And I’ll work my ass off.’ And that was it.” “Warners was run by a bunch of A&R guys who worked with people like Randy (Newman), Ry (Cooder), James Taylor, Little Feat and Allen Toussaint. We were all a little family. I think that playing blues guitar set me aside from the others. Nobody cared about having hit records.” Read more: http://www.canada.com/entertainment/fall rise Bonnie Raitt/8494702/story.html#ixzz2Voz7f4Ta
