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.
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 think we have responsibilities to be active in the things we believe in, regardless of what our job is. At least in my lifetime, there has been a tremendous combining of activism and music, that came up in the era of Pete Seeger and the Weavers and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and Peter Paul & Mary.
Im happy to say that at 62, I think Ive reached that point where stuff doesnt bother me as much, and my gratitude level has gone way up, especially having gone through the loss that Ive had, and losing so many of the great artists that I was close to. They taught me how to see it with a grain of salt and a lot of humor and perspective.
I was offered to take over for Reba in 'Annie Get Your Gun,' but it wasn't where I wanted to be. I think my fans would be upset if I confined my shows to one city for a long period of time.
'I Will Not Be Broken' has really become very healing for me. Any time you go through a cataclysmic event... it's going to inform the richness that you sing from... The experiences of life make all your emotions, I think, deeper.
I just play the music that I love with musicians that I respect, and fortunately, I'm in a position where people are willing to play with me, and perhaps I can do something to help them.
I'll close my eyes, so I won't see, all of the love that you don't feel for me.
It's so thrilling. And not just the music. The Internet is changing the future of fund-raising. I'm thrilled by the potential.
There's something about the Strat's shape that is at once masculine and feminine
Thank God for Occupy and thank God for 'The Daily Show,' Colbert and the rising up that's going on around the world.
Elvis might have compromised his musical style a bit towards the end, but that doesn't mean that artists from the rock n' roll/folk-roots culture - of which he was not really a part - shouldn't get better as they get older, like the great jazz or blues artists.
A lot of political music to me can be rather pedantic and corny, and when it's done right - like Bruce Springsteen or Jackson Browne or great satire from Randy Newman, there's nothing better.
People come up to me all the time who saw Dad in 'Oklahoma!' or 'Pajama Game,' and they say they'll never forget it.
With the new ways of getting music out, you don't need a label if you're a legacy artist.
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.
There would be no rock and roll or rhythm and blues without Leo Fenders' contribution ... the tone is everything
I didn't have to be a pop singer with a certain look. When I started, there was really a revolution in natural artists with blues and folk artists crossing over; otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to get started.
I made my first album, and I guess it wasn't a fluke, because now I'm on my 16th.
AC/DC's 'Highway to Hell' is the greatest meshing of vocal, guitar, and content I've ever heard. That's what I aspire to.
I don't think there's ever been any music quite like what we came up with.
I have a really full life, both within music and outside it.
