At this point, I think it's safe to say that all involved parties know what they're going to get out of a Bonnie Raitt album. There will be some good songs, most of them written by people other than Raitt, and most of them will be low-key and tasteful, but there will be room for a tasty slide solo or two, just so no one forgets that — middle age be damned — she's still one hell of a guitarist. Each new studio recording seems to present a wrinkle or two in the formula, just to keep things moderately interesting, but that's basically the long and the short of it. To loosely paraphrase someone or other, she do what she do, baby.

And so it is with Souls Alike, the follow-up to 2002's mostly quite great Silver Lining. The wrinkles here are twofold: First, Raitt handles most of the production, something she's never done before; and second, there isn't a twelve-bar blues anywhere to be found, also a first for a Bonnie Raitt album. Other than these two developments — neither of which will be noticeable to most listeners — Souls is pretty much par for the course with just about everything she's done since Nick of Time in 1989.

Fortunately, it's a fine course. This is wine-sipping blues, sure; if you're looking for the gritty stuff, don't look here. But you had to know that already. Anyway, Raitt and her band are absolute masters of their craft, and as modern commercial blues recordings go, Souls is all aces. The production is top-notch, first of all. Raitt goes with Tchad Blake as her co-pilot, which sounds disastrous on paper — it was Blake, with Mitchell Froom, who rendered 1997's Fundamental a gimmicky, claustrophobic mess — but either Blake has matured or he wasn't actually in the studio, because this is some of the best-sounding stuff I've heard from him. Blake's drums, in particular, are usually over-compressed and watery, but here they actually sound natural. The production overall is pretty restrained, and when a few of the gewgaws come out of the box — like on the lopsided, dissonant "Crooked Crown" — it makes sense.

There really isn't a bad song here. Some of the tracks feel a little more like filler than others, but for the most part, it's a remarkably solid album. I guess some might have a minor quibble with the fact that Raitt wrote none of the songs on this album, but she's never been the most prolific writer, and besides, she's such a great interpreter of other people's material that it really doesn't matter. She's made a cottage industry out of swelling the retirement portfolios of semi-obscure songwriters (Paul Brady to the white courtesy phone); here, she relies heavily on material from her band, who I'm sure will appreciate the royalty checks. Raitt, in particular, sounds great, presiding over the songs with a relaxed, confident authority. At a time in her career when she could be simply phoning it in, she seems to be at or near the top of her game. "Trinkets" is a great example of the minimalist, slightly greasy vibe that dominates the album. (Plus, she says "wiener dog" in it a bunch of times, which is pretty funny if you have a childish sense of humor.)¹

¹I have a very childish sense of humor.