Bonnie Raitt

A Broadway father, a borrowed bottleneck

Raitt was born in Burbank, California, on 8 November 1949, into a household where music was the family trade: her father, John Raitt, was a Broadway leading man, her mother Marge a pianist. The instrument that shaped her came from well outside that world. She picked up the guitar as a child and kept collecting blues records through school, and when she enrolled at Radcliffe College in 1967 to read social relations and African studies, those records were already winning. In her second year she left to travel with the blues promoter Dick Waterman — a decision she has since described as the opportunity that changed everything.

Waterman worked with the surviving country-blues players then being rediscovered on the American festival circuit, so Raitt served her apprenticeship in company rather than in isolation, which is why her slide playing has always sounded inherited rather than studied. Among the contemporaries who shaped her was John Hammond Jr; when he died, Raitt posted a statement on 2 March 2026 describing his influence on her own musical development as profound. Warner Bros. signed her and issued the self-titled debut, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971.

Twelve albums before the one that sold

The 1970s produced the records that built her reputation without building her sales: Give It Up in 1972, Takin' My Time in 1973, Sweet Forgiveness in 1977. The arrangement eventually ran out. Warner Bros. dropped her in 1983 after shelving an album called Tongue and Groove, and she spent the rest of the decade without a label.

Capitol signed her in 1989 and the result was the sharpest reversal in her catalogue. Nick of Time reached No. 1 and won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1990, after eighteen years of records that critics liked and shops did not move. Luck of the Draw followed in 1991 and carried the ballad she is still most asked for, the Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin song 'I Can't Make You Love Me', with Bruce Hornsby on piano. Longing in Their Hearts arrived in 1994, and the pattern since has been steady rather than frantic — Slipstream in 2012, Dig In Deep in 2016.

Along the way the institutional recognition accumulated: induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2024. Her competitive Grammy count stands at thirteen from thirty-one nominations.

Just Like That… and the win nobody had pencilled in

Her twenty-first studio album, Just Like That…, came out on 22 April 2022 on her own Redwing Records, distributed by ADA, with Sub Pop handling the physical release in the United States. She produced it herself and worked for a third time with the engineer Ryan Freeland. Ten tracks, four of them her own writing, including 'Living for the Ones', co-written with her longtime guitarist George Marinelli as a rock dedication to friends and family she had lost.

At the 65th Grammy Awards on 5 February 2023 the title track took both Best American Roots Song and Song of the Year — the second of those an outright upset over far higher-charting records. Raitt has been candid about how little the wider world had her on its list: she recalled the Daily Mail putting her on the cover under the line 'Unknown blues singer wins Grammy'. The win mattered to her for a narrower reason, too. For most of her career she had been read as an interpreter of other writers' songs rather than a writer herself, and Song of the Year arrived for something she had written alone.

The song has kept finding new audiences away from radio. It was used in the Season 5 premiere of the FX series Welcome to Wrexham, announced on 15 May 2026, to mark an organ donor — the subject the lyric is built around.

Where she stands in October 2026

The present tour, billed simply as Live 2026, has been assembled in stages rather than announced whole. It opened on 28 May in Spokane, Washington, worked up the Pacific Northwest to a 13 June finish in Bellingham, then crossed into Canada from Vancouver on 16 June through to Winnipeg on 27 June. A second leg ran from 12 August to 10 September across Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Montana, Wyoming and the mountain states, taking in the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand on 27 August and Red Butte Garden in Salt Lake City on 9 September. Big Blues Bender at the Westgate in Las Vegas followed on 11 and 13 September.

On 19 March 2026 she announced the extension that turned the year into a five-month run: a California and Nevada stretch from 7 to 21 October, with tickets on general sale the following morning. That leg included her first headline show in San Francisco in several years, at The Theater at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium on 10 October, and ends with two nights at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre on 20 and 21 October — her return to that building after nearly thirty years. The opening date in Redding was cancelled when the Redding Civic Auditorium closed on 31 July 2026. Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium went ahead on 14 October and The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park in San Diego on 17 October.

Support has rotated across the year. The special guests were confirmed on 14 April 2026: Maia Sharp, Julia Keefe and Jon Cleary across different stretches of North America. Cleary and his band, The Absolute Monster Gentlemen, have the Canadian dates from 16 June and the whole October run. Raitt also stepped outside her own billing twice — onto Brandi Carlile's Echoes Through the Canyon at The Gorge Amphitheatre on 30 May, and on 11 September to induct Carlile into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame and perform with her, in an episode that aired on PBS the following night. In the studio, she sang backing vocals on Bruce Hornsby's single 'Ecstatic', announced on 4 March 2026, thirty-five years after he played on 'I Can't Make You Love Me'.

The shape of the set

The 2026 show has settled into a thirteen-song main set and a three-song encore, averaging about an hour and thirty-seven minutes across the nineteen complete setlists logged for the year. It opens with 'Tangled and Dark' and closes the main set with her reading of Annie Lennox's 'Little Bird'. Roughly half the night is other people's songs — John Hiatt's 'Thing Called Love', Bob Dylan's 'Standing in the Doorway', The Bros. Landreth's 'Made Up Mind', Gerry Rafferty's 'Right Down the Line', Shirley Eikhard's 'Something to Talk About' — threaded through her own 'Spit of Love', 'Nick of Time' and 'Just Like That'. The encore has run to 'I Can't Make You Love Me', Mose Allison's 'Everybody's Cryin' Mercy' and 'I Believe I'm in Love With You', with a B.B. King number sometimes added. Jon Cleary comes back on mid-set to share his own 'No Gettin' Over You'.

The staging is deliberately bare. Reviewing the Minnesota State Fair show on 27 August 2026, a critic noted a setup simple enough to leave nothing but the playing to watch, and said it needed no dancers, costume changes or scenery; the night's standouts were 'Thing Called Love', 'Right Down the Line' and a crowd-sung 'Something to Talk About', and Raitt dedicated a song to her late brother Steve. Cleary's opening set, piano-led New Orleans blues, funk and soul, drew its own notice, and the two played together as though nothing needed arranging.

Earlier reviews read similarly. A near-sold-out Vina Robles Amphitheatre show in Paso Robles in September 2024 ran eighteen songs in 105 minutes, with Ricky Fataar on drums, and the reviewer's point was that at 74 she was not working as a nostalgia act — new material sat level with the old, and she spoke from the stage about current events and her anti-nuclear campaigning of the 1970s. That night ran a no-photographs, no-video policy, which the reviewer took as a favour to the room rather than to the band. At Riverwind Casino's Showplace Theatre in Norman, Oklahoma, in March 2025, with Roy Rogers opening solo, the band was Fataar, James 'Hutch' Hutchinson on bass, Glenn Patscha on keys and Duke Levin on guitar, and the reviewer's verdict on the playing was that it was impeccable and the vocals close to perfect. The recurring complaint, when there is one, is omission: the set is tight enough that some long-held favourites do not make it.