Since I was 20 years old, I’ve been a kind of corporation. I’d wake up in the morning and my job was to be ‘Bonnie Raitt’ in capital letters.
I have a really full life, both within music and outside it.
I’m one of those people who just doesn’t plan my personal life. I plan my professional life.
I like to think I get better with age, but maybe absence makes the heart grow fonder.
I’m not that beautiful, and I don’t want to be a pop star.
I made my first album, and I guess it wasn’t a fluke, because now I’m on my 16th.
I don’t think there’s ever been any music quite like what we came up with.
I think I’m a living embodiment of, ‘Don’t try to push me around or squash me,’ whether its how I talk to a record label or in my relationships.
Sometimes I’m more true when I’m up onstage than I’m able to be in my regular life. It’s not as exciting to be at home, but I’ve got to learn how to make that work, and then I will be an ordinary woman.
I’m in a relationship, and I’ve been in one in a while, but all the people I’ve been with at various points – and I’ve had sequentially monogamous relationships my whole life – were all the right people at the right time.
Pat Benatar might need a rock band, but I can just sit with a blues guitar for an hour and a half and do folk songs and great contemporary ballads, and not many people can pull that off.
There were so many great music and political scenes going on in the late ’60s in Cambridge. The ratio of guys to girls at Harvard was four to one, so all of those things were playing in my mind.
You don’t have to look a certain way to have a hit record.
I thought I had to live that partying lifestyle in order to be authentic, but in fact if you keep it up too long, all you’re going to be is sloppy or dead.
Maybe the idea of me is more powerful than I perceive myself being.
With slide guitar, you’re just hanging this piece of glass on your hand. It’s a really beautiful instrument in that it’s so responsive, you’re just slipping your hand back and forth.
I’m glad I get singled out for my slide guitar-playing, which isn’t that difficult to do. I didn’t take guitar lessons, but I just love the way it sounds, almost like the human voice.
The generation I grew up in was the beginning of “stand up for yourself,” whether being a singer-songwriter or a feminist. In my college years, the feminist movement was really coming to fore, so we wouldn’t have put up with guys treating us less than equal.
I speak my mind and come from a place of conscience, as well as have fun as a musician.
I don’t know that I’m unique in that people relate to my music, but I would hope people would say that I’m honest and that I do the best work I can possibly do instead of coasting.
I just want to be as good a person as I can be.