The show sent over these details: Before the release of her tenth album Nick of Time twenty-five years ago, Bonnie Raitt was a bit of a puzzle. For two decades she had been a critic's darling starting with her 1971 debut (four stars), Give It Up in 1972 (four and a half stars), 1973′s Takin' My Time and Streetlights the following year (again, four out of five stars). Musically, Bonnie Raitt did everything and every American style well except write prolifically, but her superb ear for finding excellent songs meant that she didn't have to.

Nine albums' worth of modest sales and little songwriting royalties required Raitt to tour long and hard throughout the Seventies and deep into the Eighties just to keep new strings on her National steel guitar, and the "medicine" she increasingly consumed for her white line road fever eventually stopped killing the pain and began causing it. Her first post-recovery album Nick of Time, released in March 1989, sold five times more than all previous nine albums combined, and won three Grammy Awards including the coveted Album of the Year thanks to such songs as John Hiatt's "Thing Called Love", Jerry Williams' "Real Man" and the deadly "I Will Not Be Denied", the gorgeous shimmering "Cry on My Shoulder", and two terrific Bonnie Hayes compositions,"Love Letter" and the reggae-inflected "Have a Heart". Bonnie reflects on what her career has taught her with InTheStudio host Redbeard.