Thing Called Love

The guitar tones here are unmistakably rooted in the Texas and Louisiana tradition — clean-to-slightly-dirty electric, working a shuffled groove with the kind of rhythmic ease that signals deep familiarity with the idiom. Raitt isn't playing this song so much as inhabiting it, her voice carrying an ease that only comes from total comfort with the material. The John Hiatt composition is built around a deceptively simple premise: love isn't a sentimental abstraction, it's a plain fact, a "thing called love" that doesn't need poeticizing because its existence is self-evident. This anti-sentimentality suits Raitt completely. She's always been more convincing when the material keeps its boots on the ground, and this song never lifts off into metaphor. The rhythm section works with a satisfying solidity, not fancy, just deeply in the pocket, and the piano fills the harmonic space without ornamentation. Released in 1989 on Nick of Time, this track showcased Raitt's ability to take an already-great song and make it feel like it was written specifically for her register — both vocal and emotional. John Hiatt's other recorded version is excellent, but Raitt's reading has a certain no-nonsense warmth that becomes definitive. This is music for people who don't need love songs to be complicated, who believe that the cleaner the statement of feeling, the truer it tends to be.