Bonnie Raitt – I Can’t Make You Love Me

„I Can’t Make You Love Me” is a 1991 popular song, written by Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin and recorded by Bonnie Raitt on her Luck of the Draw album from that year. In August 2000, Mojo magazine voted „I Can’t Make You Love Me” #8 on its The 100 Greatest Songs Of All Time list.

The idea for the song came to Reid while reading an article about a man arrested for getting drunk and shooting at his girlfriend’s car. The judge asked him if he had learned anything, to which he replied, „I learned, Your Honor, that you can’t make a woman love you if she don’t.” Reid and Shamblin were both country music songwriters, who according to some accounts originally wrote the song as a fast, bluegrass number. Upon slowing down the tempo considerably, they realized the song gained considerable power. It then made its way to Raitt.

A pensive ballad, „I Can’t Make You Love Me” was recorded against a quiet electric piano-based arrangement, with prominent piano fills and interpolations supplied by Bruce Hornsby. The singer depicts a now one-sided romantic relationship about to end in soft but brutally honest terms:

Turn down these voices, inside my head –

Lay down with me … tell me no lies.

Just hold me close,

don’t patronize … don’t patronize me

‘Cause I can’t make you love me,

If you don’t.

Raitt recorded the vocal in just one take in the studio, later saying that it was so sad a song that she couldn’t recapture the emotion: „We’d try to do it again and I just said, ‘You know, this ain’t going to happen.'”

The song was a big hit for Raitt, reaching #18 on the U.S. pop singles chart and #6 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and helped solidify her remarkable late-in-career commercial success that had begun two years before. In the time since, „I Can’t Make You Love Me” has gone on to become a pop standard and a mainstay of adult contemporary radio formats.

For Raitt, the song was notoriously difficult to sing, due to its required vocal range, difficult phrasing and breathing, and the emotional content involved. At the televised Grammy Awards of 1992 Raitt performed it in an even more austere setting than on record, with just her and Hornsby highlighted. As she negotiated the final vocal line, she let out a big audible and visible sigh of relief that she had successfully gotten through it. Raitt has continued to sing the song in all her concert tours.

verse:
turn down the lights
turn down the bed
turn down these voices
inside my head
lay down with me
tell me no lies
just hold me close
don’t patronize
don’t patronize me

chorus:
i can’t make you love me if you don’t
you can’t make your heart feel
somethin’ it wont
here in the dark,in these final hours
i will lay down my heart
and feel the power if you wont
no you wont
cuz i can’t make you love me
if you don’t

verse:
i’ll close my eyes
then i wont see
the love you dont feel
when your holdin’ me
morning will come
and i’ll do whats right
just give me till then
to give up this fight
and i will give up this fight

(chorus)