Just Like That...

When Bonnie Raitt was dreaming up Just Like That..., her first album in six years, she had a very specific mission in mind: Record the songs she’s always wanted to, and especially the most soulful, funky ones she could find. “I always got my ear cocked for either old soul chestnuts or some obscure album cut off of an artist that I haven't listened to for a while,” she told Apple Music's Zane Lowe. “I'm just always hunting.”

Some of the songs are covers or tributes inspired by other artists: She fell in love with The Bros. Landreth’s “Made Up Mind,” the album’s lead-off track, when the band opened for her on tour in 2014, while Al Anderson of NRBQ’s “Something’s Got a Hold of My Heart” has been stuck in her head for three decades. Others, like the album’s title track, are new compositions inspired by the legendary singer-songwriter’s own favorite songs and songwriters.

“I knew that this time when I wrote, I wanted to write from a third-person point of view,” Bonnie Raitt said. “Either a short story or something that moved me out in the world from somebody else's life story, because I'd really mined a lot of my own personal life. I'd pretty much covered all the members of my family, my relationships, and I just loved story songs, and I hadn't done one except for a song called 'All at Once' that I did years ago. I love John Prine's 'Angel From Montgomery' and 'Donald and Lydia,' and I love the music of early Dylan, the first few albums where it's just him fingerpicking in a voice unadorned. I wanted a song to tell as a very simple story.”

“Just Like That” is both simple and not, in that it touches on deep love, painful truth, and devastating loss—all things that Raitt felt acutely as she worked on the album over the course of the trauma and furious change she witnessed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. “It's hard to separate the last couple of years' COVID experience from the nightmare of the election cycle, and the polarity, hostility, and viciousness that's become what our country's climate is,” she says. “I just wasn't expecting that in this lifetime. It gave me a purpose. I knew that we eventually were going to either get back on the road or I was going to get in the studio, so it felt healing to have something to focus on and pull those songs together and know that people are hurting out there. And I can't wait to get on the road—not just to support my band and crew and the groups that I support, but to have some fun again and bring some light.”