I Can't Make You Love Me

Songwriters Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin were reading a newspaper story about a drunk driver who told the judge “I can’t make her love me if she don’t” — they wrote the song around that sentence. Bonnie Raitt turned it into the definitive adult breakup song, a five-and-a-half minute accounting of what it costs to stay one more night with someone you know will leave.

Bruce Hornsby plays the piano. Raitt sings it like someone who has stopped hoping and is just trying to get the truth recorded before the morning erases it. There is no catharsis and no resolution because grief for the living doesn’t come with those. There is only the arrangement, the voice, and the understanding — fully arrived at — that the other person is already gone.