From the Chicago Tribune:
So, I asked, if you were to write a letter to Bonnie Raitt, what would you say?
"I'd say, before it got too late I wanted to tell her ..." She paused. "I wanted to tell her that every time I see her on TV I think about her when she was a baby and I saw her onstage with her father. I think she would like to know somebody was alive who remembered."
The columnist is a little tone deaf (strange, considering she's talking about her own mother) but even in her flat-footed telling, I find the anecdote dignified in its touching simplicity, presuming that connection is a good in its own right, and a great one, and I believe Bonnie Raitt—who I love beyond expression—would appreciate the gesture very, very much. (The author gets at least that much right.) Moreover, the context of the woman's encounter with baby Bonnie—John Raitt's scene in Carousel—may clarify, in a way, Ms. Raitt's entire aesthetic. God, "I Can't Make You Love Me" is a song of rare and undiminished power. It is perfect, perfect pathos. So perfect, in fact, not a thousand karaoke performances can dim it, nor worse still, the occasional American Idol rendition. Some other favorites: "Circle Dance," "Let's Hear it For the Boy," "Have a Heart," "One Belief Away," "Hear Me Lord," "My Opening Farewell," "Wounded Heart." I have heard her do a mean cover of "Find My Way Home," too. Every time I listen to her music—probably, if I could, just the sound of her voice—I remark to myself, utterly undone: that is life. For the same reason, and perhaps in the same tone, Emily Dickinson once described poetry in the way that she did.
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