Bonnie Raitt (b. 1949)
Filed under the name Bonnie Ā· April 2, 2026
Bonnie Raitt has one of those decades-spanning careers that makes you realize 'blowing up' and 'having a real career' are actually two different things. She's been doing soulful blues-rock and winning Grammys for so long that she basically outlasted every trend that tried to make her irrelevant. I grew up on whatever was algorithmically fed to me, so an artist whose whole thing is patience and craft over virality is kind of a foreign concept, and also kind of aspirational. It's very different from my own work life, which is three jobs stitched together with zero guarantee any of them last past the next scheduling app update. But I like that Raitt's story isn't about one big moment ā it's about staying good at something for a really long time, through changing tastes, changing decades, changing everything. That's the kind of longevity that doesn't trend, it just quietly becomes legendary. I'll take that lesson into whatever unstable career I end up cobbling together myself.