Bonnie Raitt’s “Nick of Time”

Last month, I finally saw Bonnie Raitt live. On a cool summer evening, I made the lengthy drive over to the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, unfurled a blanket, and sat beneath the stars. What an ideal setting to hear her play “Nick of Time.” Appearing as the first track on her 1989 album of the same name, “Nick of Time” follows an endearingly buoyant keyboard riff, like a river’s cascading current. For a mid-tempo song that courses alongside that melody, it has a decidedly melancholic undertow. I’ve always enjoyed that juxtaposition: the brightness gleaming at the surface, the duskiness slinking underneath.

It’s one of only a handful of songs Raitt wrote for her tenth album. Considering that she’d built her reputation around country blues and the slide guitar, “Nick of Time” is a notable departure—you can still hear faint echoes of the blues in each verse, but ’80s synth-pop surrounds them as though to soften her meaning. Raitt wrote the track when she was 39 and taking measure of time’s passage: how painful it can be when you don’t yet have what you want or when you do and the fear of losing it grows sharper as the years grow shorter. After verses detailing her childless close friend and aging parents, Raitt inserts herself more fully into the picture with a particular verse I’ve always warmed to.

“Just when I thought I’d had enough/ And all my tears were shed/ No promise left unbroken/ There were no painful words unsaid,” she sings from a place of bracing honesty. “You came along and showed me/ I could leave it all behind/ You opened up my heart again/ And then much to my surprise/ I found love, baby, love in the nick of time.” I’d listen to the title track as proof positive that I’d be one of those “late in life” love stories. If Raitt found love past the “prime” of when so many others tend to discover it, then maybe there was hope for me yet.

Here’s the thing: I’d long assumed Raitt had written the song from a place of real experience, but far from it. At 39, she was single, grappling with her recent-ish decision to get sober, and fighting for her music. Her label Warner Bros had dropped her after nine albums—none hits—a decision that could easily have signaled the end of her career. But Raitt wasn’t ready to give up. She approached other labels until finally Capitol Records offered her a deal—the only one and on rather paltry terms at that.

Raitt credits Capitol’s lack of investment with providing her the creative freedom that resulted in Nick of Time. It went on to become her first hit album, finding even more commercial success after it won four Grammys in 1990, including Album of the Year. The music industry had all but written her off, and here she came back with a force. A different kind of “nick of time.”

For me, listening to the song live at the new age of 41 and alone as I’ve ever been, I heard something new. After spending some thirty-odd years kindling the hopeful flame—at times a faint flicker, others a sturdy fire—that one day I’d find lasting love, I’d recently decided to extinguish that light. Why bother to keep it burning? I took my metaphorical brass candle stopper and snuffed it out, watching the plumes of smoke sift up through the air before dissolving into the atmosphere.

Ever since I developed my first crush at age 10, my romantic side has played an outsized role, taking up more mental space than I would have liked to cede. Lately, however, it’s been inaccessible—in the vein of Bon Iver singing, “All my love was down/ In a frozen ground,” on “Re: Stacks.” It’s winter in that part of my spirit, and this time there’s no sign of possible thaw. Partly, it’s the demands of navigating a chronic illness that pilfers my energy, leaving me hardly enough to get through the bare minimum of a day. Partly, it’s not knowing how to find a connection that’s both a good match and covid-safe so I don’t risk reinfection. And partly, it’s the idea itself. I’m enjoying being alone.

Either way, I’m moving toward a future where I may never have a serious romantic partner again—where, truthfully, I don’t even want to be alive for the duration it would take to grow old with someone—and lately that idea feels better than anything I’ve found in a relationship. Maybe this frozen piece of me will thaw one day, maybe there’s still a “nick of time” romantic moment in my future, or maybe it’s that my true “nick of time” is finally finding myself and accepting that it’s enough. A late-in-life love story still.