‘Do something with your actions. Don’t just write a cheque’: Bonnie Raitt on activism, making men cry and 38 years of sobriety

Going back out on tour, the 13-time Grammy winner recalls stark inspirations and steamy studio sessions as she answers your questionsYou’ve had a decades-long career. When did you first feel that you had “made it”? LondonLuvverI wasn’t expecting to do music for a job. I was into social activism in college, and I just had music as a hobby. My boyfriend managed a bunch of blues artists and I asked if I could open for some of them – just to have fun and hang out with my heroes. Unbeknown to me, there really weren’t any women playing blues guitar and doing the mix of songs [I was], and I immediately got more offers of gigs and even a record company offer within about a year. That first gig I got under my own name, when I was 19, was a total surprise: that’s when I felt I had made it.How was it growing up with a father [John Raitt] who was such a big Broadway star? Abbeyorchards7He had hits in the 1940s with Carousel, and in the 50s with The Pajama Game. By the time I was 10 or 11, he was on the road touring in the summer – he loved taking Broadway shows out to the countryside. That influenced me a lot later when I decided to veer off from college and go into music: his love of travelling, of every night being opening night, and putting everything he had into every performance. And he was on tour basically until his mid-80s, so I think that had a tremendous influence on me: like, we can’t believe we get paid, and this is our job. Continue reading...

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Alec Baldwin’s Rust deemed ‘uninspired’ and ‘a tough slog’ by critics years after fatal on-set tragedy

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