I Can't Make You Love Me

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“I Can't Make You Love Me”

Single by Bonnie Raitt from the album Luck of the Draw
Released	October 22, 1991
Format	cassette single
Genre	standard
Length	5:33
Label	Capitol Records
Writer(s)	Mike Reid Allen Shamblin
Producer	Bonnie Raitt Don Was

"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.^[1]

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."^[2] 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.'"^[3]

The song was a big hit for Raitt, reaching the Top 20 of the U.S. pop singles chart and the Top 10 of 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.

“	I mean, 'I Can't Make You Love Me' is no picnic. I love that song, so does the audience. So it's almost a sacred moment when you share that, that depth of pain with your audience. Because they get really quiet, and I have to summon ... some other place in order to honor that space.	”
	— Raitt, 2002 NPR interview^[4]

Although Hornsby had no hand in writing the song, his piano part on it became associated with him, and on his own subsequent tours he would often perform it whenever he had a female backing singer in his band to take on the vocal.

While Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" was not a big success in the United Kingdom, as part of George Michael's 1997 double a side single "Older / I Can't Make You Love Me", it reached the Top 3 of the UK Singles Chart. It has also been recorded by a number of other artists, including Prince, Bonnie Tyler, Kenny Rogers, Kimberley Locke and Gina G to name a few. Saxophonist Candy Dulfer has also recorded an instrumental version. A version by the band Venice was featured over the end credits of the controversial film Boxing Helena.

It has become a popular selection for contestants in televised singing competitions such as American Idol, Nashville Star, and Rock Star: INXS. This song was performed by Idol contestants: Kimberley Locke in Season 2, Constantine Maroulis in Season 4, and Amy Krebs in Season 6, as well as Nashville Season 5 winner Angela Hacker. Moreover, Season 4 Idol winner Carrie Underwood and Season 6 finalist Haley Scarnato sang this song during their initial auditions.