It might be one of her signature songs, but Bonnie Raitt says that her 1991 hit, I Can’t Make You Love Me, wouldn’t have been the musical gut punch that it is without Bruce Hornsby’s piano playing.
Written by Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin, I Can’t Make You Love Me wasn’t a song that grabbed Raitt immediately. “I sent it to Bonnie and she didn’t jump up and down and say ‘oh my God!’, you know?” Reid told Top 2000 a gogo. “She didn’t do that - she called me and we talked and she said ‘would you mind letting me live with this?’ And then eventually she listened and got the song and so we just happened to have the perfect singer at that time.”
And, in the end, the perfect piano player. Speaking to The New York Times in a new profile of Hornsby – his new album, Indigo Park, is set for release on 3 April – Raitt says: “I think he made all the difference. The reason that song is the heartbreaker it is, is because of the way that he interprets those chords. That’s not how the demo sounded. Even in the intro alone, it already breaks your heart.”
Article continues belowWe agree wholeheartedly but, according to Mike Reid, who played piano on that demo, it might not have ended up this way. He says that Don Was, who produced the song with Raitt, later told him that the recording of Hornsby’s part had its moments of tension.
“Bruce would play it and Bonnie would say ‘no, listen to the demo again,’” says Reid. “And Bruce was just very - this is the story I got from Don - resistant. And Don said ‘no, no, no: Bruce, listen to the demo’. And finally he said, ‘why don’t you get him [Reid] out here?’ and left the studio.
“And then he cooled - cooler heads prevailed - and he came back and made it. It’s essentially the [piano] line that we wrote, but he made it Bruce Hornsby. He made it his.”
Indeed he did, and the song itself has become a modern standard, covered by everyone from George Michael and Prince to Adele and Bon Iver.
The combination of Raitt and Hornsby brought a special kind of magic, though, as witnessed at the 1992 Grammy Awards, when the two of them performed it together.
What's more, the two are still collaborating: Raitt features on Ecstatic, a new Hornsby song that's included on Indigo Park.
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