Bonnie Raitt discusses how she picks songs (Wall Street Journal interview)

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Bonnie Raitt commented "I'm sure I would be considered a more significant artist if I was a singer-songwriter.' She also spoke about how she finds songs to record - evidently, her kitchen CD player gets a workout.

Bonnie Raitt and opener Marc Cohn will perform at The Kentucky Center May 13. Tickets start at $54.50 and are selling briskly. Click here for additional information and purchase tickets online.

From the interview:

The Wall Street Journal: As you're looking for songs to record, do you have an organizing system?

Ms. Raitt: For the first the 30 years or so, I took all comers. Cassettes, cassettes, cassettes piled in big boxes. I'd take a shoe box full of them in the car. I'd know whether it was something for me by the time we'd get halfway through the first verse or chorus. In all those years I never was able to find or record a song from an unprofessional person sending me a tape. Now, everyone can make a CD and you can't distinguish. The old CD player in the kitchen gets the most use now. Pop 'em in, pop 'em out. It's a lot of research. I ask friends and other people in the same artistic gene pool. My house looks like a hurricane usually for a year before I make a record. I wish I had an assistant that had the same taste, but it's just me.

Did you ever wish songwriting was a bigger part of your identity?

No, it didn't even occur to me. I had higher standards than the stuff I could come up with. When you're starting with Randy [Newman] and Jackson [Browne] and John Prine and Mose Allison, the bar is raised pretty high. I grew up with a dad [Broadway star John Raitt] who sang other people's music, and I loved Aretha and Ray Charles, who were primarily interpreters of other writers. When you find a song that you love, you just have to do it—why would I try to match it? When I wrote more of the songs in the '90s—"Nick of Time" and other songs I was surprised I came up with—it was because nobody else was saying what I wanted to say.

Read the full article here.

Check-out upcoming Kentucky Center Presents shows, including Bill Cosby, Bill Maher, and Diana Krall,  at www.kentuckycenter.org/presents.