Bonnie Raitt sounds relaxed, refreshed and reinvigorated.
That's because she took an entire year off. No searching for new songs, no sitting in with other musicians, no performing at benefits. No nothing to do with her music career.
She needed to. She had been through a long period of loss -- her mom in 2004, her dad in 2005 and her brother and best friend, Twin Cities sound engineer Steve Raitt, in 2009 of brain cancer.
"I really needed to stop the business of thinking what I was going to do next," said Raitt, who returns to the State Fair grandstand next Thursday. "It was really fun for me to just be a civilian and a fan and go to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival two years in a row and not sit in. And go hear Cuban music and African music."
And she went to museums, modern dance performances and yoga.
"All of the caretaking and worry and stress and pain around Steve's illness and before that my parents and also a good friend who was going through a cancer fight, that was really draining," she said. "I really needed to come off the road and allow myself the time to feel all of that pain."
Basically, Raitt spent the equivalent of a prolonged 12-month winter.
"You can't always be producing or thinking what you're going to harvest if you don't let that field lay fallow," she said. "That's what I needed to do. At some point you have to stop and heal."
