The Song Had Been Sitting on a Demo Tape for Seven Years — Anne Murray Had Already Said No

Shirley Eikhard wrote “Something to Talk About” in Nashville in 1985. She was a veteran Canadian singer-songwriter — Juno Award winner, country hitmaker, composer of songs recorded by Cher, Anne Murray, and Chet Atkins — and she believed in the song from the start. The problem was finding someone who agreed. She offered it to Murray, who was interested but whose producers decided against it. She offered it to others, each of whom expressed interest but ultimately passed. Murray even named her 1985 album Something to Talk About without including the song itself. For seven years, Eikhard kept the track on the back burner, still convinced it would find its home. Then one evening she came home to find a message on her answering machine. It was Bonnie Raitt, playing back a recording she had just finished. “I got home and there was this thing on my machine,” Eikhard recalled. “There was Bonnie. I was numb.”

Raitt had found Eikhard’s demo tape some time earlier and set it aside. By the time she returned to it, she was in the middle of something remarkable. Her 1989 album Nick of Time — her tenth studio album, her first for Capitol Records, made after Warner Bros. dropped her in 1986 following years of addiction — had swept four Grammy Awards including Album of the Year. Rather than celebrate, Raitt had gone into creative retreat in Northern California, wanting to write before she found out if she had won. “I wanted to make sure that I had done some writing and didn’t feel that Nick of Time was a fluke,” she told the New York Times in 1991. Working again with producer Don Was, the sessions for Luck of the Draw were described by Raitt as “surprisingly loose” — “when you get the right people who really vibe with each other, you don’t have to say much at all.” Finding Eikhard’s cassette at the right moment, she told CBC, felt like receiving exactly what she needed: “a catchy, smart and fresh way of looking at romance — playful and something I really hadn’t done before.”

The recording placed Raitt’s slide guitar at the front of a blues-groove arrangement that swings with the same unforced authority she brought to everything on the album. The session musicians on the track included bassist James “Hutch” Hutchinson, drummers Ricky Fataar and Curt Bisquera, keyboardist Scott Thurston, acoustic guitarist Stephen Bruton, percussionist Debra Dobkin, and backing vocalists Sweet Pea Atkinson, Sir Harry Bowens, and David Lasley. The full personnel of Luck of the Draw was one of the more deliberately assembled roots-rock rosters of the period — the album also featured Richard Thompson, Bruce Hornsby, Benmont Tench, Ivan Neville, and John Hiatt as a duet partner. Into this company, “Something to Talk About” arrived as the album’s opening track and first single, serviced to US radio on June 3, 1991.

Five on the Hot 100, One at the Grammys

The single spent twenty weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number five in October 1991. It reached the same position on the Adult Contemporary chart. In Canada it climbed to number three on the RPM Top 100. At the 34th Grammy Awards in February 1992, Raitt won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for the recording — beating Oleta Adams, Mariah Carey, Amy Grant, and Whitney Houston. The track was also nominated for Record of the Year, losing to “Unforgettable” by Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole. Raitt made sure to thank Eikhard from the stage. Luck of the Draw itself went on to sell seven million copies in the United States alone, outselling Nick of Time by two million and becoming the best-selling album of Raitt’s career. The dedication in the liner notes named Stevie Ray Vaughan — who had died in a helicopter crash in August 1990 after finally getting sober, who had in earlier years encouraged Raitt to address her own drinking — with the words “still burning bright.” The album’s title, Raitt told the Associated Press, was about fate: why some people get through and others don’t.

For Eikhard, the outcome was transformative in its own right. She received a Juno nomination for Songwriter of the Year in 1992, and the song was later recognised with a SOCAN Classics award and multiple BMI awards for its radio longevity. It was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2020. Eikhard had told RPM Weekly that a songwriter must believe in themselves and in the song — that “Something to Talk About” was proof positive that if you really believe in the tune, you should never give up. She died in December 2022 at sixty-seven, after a three-year battle with cancer. Raitt posted: “I will be forever grateful for our beautiful connection and friendship.” The song was the thing that connected them — a track written in Nashville in 1985, rejected by a series of artists who should have known better, found on a demo tape at exactly the moment the right singer needed something to sing.

The Video That Placed Her at the Peak

The official video for “Something to Talk About” captures Raitt at the precise point where the long-delayed career breakthrough had fully arrived and was building into something larger. The slide guitar is right there in the opening bars — the instrument she had played since her student days at Harvard, where she had discovered the blues tradition through records and then gone looking for its living practitioners in person. The vocal is relaxed, authoritative, playful in the way Eikhard had intended the song to be and the way Raitt had instinctively understood it. AllMusic called the track a “sly, sexy distillation of Raitt’s persona.” Rolling Stone had given the album four stars. The comeback that began with Nick of Time was no longer a comeback — it had become simply what Bonnie Raitt did, with the technical command and interpretive intelligence she had always possessed and the commercial recognition that had taken twenty years to find her.