Artist: Rita Coolidge
Album: Safe in the Arms of Time
Label: Blue Elan
Release Date: 5.4.2018
Admittedly, it’s a bit surprising to be writing about a new roots album from Rita Coolidge. The “Delta Lady” came to prominence almost 50 years ago with Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen, and later with then-husband Kris Kristofferson before embarking on a hugely successful commercial solo career. This is her 18th solo album, propelled by inspiration and reaction to her 2015 memoir, Delta Lady. She claims it’s the best record she’s ever done, due to a new outlook and perhaps because she wrote some of the material rather than doing cover songs.
“The idea was making an album that had the same appeal of my early records—to make a roots record about my own roots,” Rita said. Her voice is remarkably clear and strong, showing no effects of aging. As you might expect, she was able to gather an impressive list of musicians and collaborators; she and producer Ross Hogarth assembled guitarist Dave Grissom (who is especially brilliant throughout), bassist Bob Glaub, John “J.T.” Thomas on keyboards and drummer Brian Macleod—at L.A.’s Sunset Sound, the same studio where Rita recorded her first solo albums. She also collaborated with one of her favorite musicians, Keb ’Mo, to write (with singer-songwriter Jill Colucci) two of the album’s better songs, “Walking on Water” (a duet with ‘Mo) and “Naked All Night.”
The album also rather unexpectedly reunited Coolidge with Graham Nash, her romantic and creative confidant during Crosby, Stills & Nash’s heyday, and one of her most enduring friends. Nash and L.A. session drummer Russ Kunkel had written “Doing Fine Without You” and offered it to Coolidge. “That was one of the first songs we chose. Russell and Graham had written that and thought of me, and I said, ‘I don’t know when I’m doing a record, can I put this on hold?’” Two years later, the song found its way in.
Perhaps the most compelling theme of the album is that it’s never too late. Former Tom Petty drummer Stan Lynch, Joe Hutto and Coolidge, composed “You Can Fall in Love,” about reconnecting with an old flame. “People need to have an awakening that you can fall in love at any age and it will feel right, like you’re 15,” Coolidge said.
These songs represent the first new music Coolidge has recorded since the tragic death in 2015 of her sister, Priscilla, a recording artist and member of Walela, the Native American trio she and Rita founded with Priscilla’s daughter, Laura Satterfield. The recording of the album also coincided with Coolidge’s relocation from Southern California, her home since the 1970s, to a new life in Tallahassee, where in the 1960s, as an art major at Florida State University, she discovered her true calling as a musician. There’s a bit of “full circle” going on here in more than one respect.
It’s great to have Coolidge sharing her music with us enthusiastically again. She’s been a part of so many memorable songs, first as a backup singer for Joe Cocker, for Stephen Stills on “Love the One You’re With,” to Eric Clapton’s “After Midnight” and such solo hits as “We’re All Alone” and “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” among others. She even, unbeknownst to most, wrote that famous piano coda in “Layla.”
Fittingly, her closing song is the piano-driven ballad “Please Grow Old with Me.” Unlike many of her contemporaries, it’s refreshing to hear Rita Coolidge sound so vital.
—Jim Hynes
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