Rita Coolidge is Walking on Water

EDITOR’S NOTE: Before the flood of new releases begins in 2019, we’re looking back at some releases from last year that we didn’t get a chance to write up when they were released. Rita Coolidge’s Safe in the Arms of Time was released in May.

Rita Coolidge’s new album Safe in the Arms of Time opens with a gorgeous, life-affirming tune that serves as the theme for the rest of the album. “Satisfied” opens simply with Coolidge’s vocals accompanied by the David Grissom’s full, lustrous downstrums. After the first verse, the song swells with the angelic background vocals of Chelsea Williams and Sara Niemietz, punctuated by Joey Landreth’s plaintively joyful cello runs. With echoes of Bernie Leadon’s “I Wish You Peace,” the chorus delivers not just a wish for a lover left behind but a universal message of hope: “I … wish you peace / On the wings of love / In anything that you try / I hope you find the answers / To the questions in your heart / May you be satisfied.”

“Doing Fine without You” could just as easily have come from Rita Coolidge’s first, eponymous album — listen to “Mud Island” or “That Man is My Weakness” — with its funky, soulful vibe, and its spirited take-no-prisoners rock and soul delivery. Her phrasing of the line “wonder how I’m doing” sounds almost exactly like the phrasing she brings to her version of Otis Redding’s “The Happy Song” on that first album. “This was the first song I chose for the album,” says Coolidge. “Graham Nash sent it to me through email — he wrote it with Russ Kunkel — and I loved it. It set the bar kind of high. I had been mulling around the idea that I wanted this album to be more like my earlier records, with a more organic sound. Hearing and choosing that song verified that I was on the right track.”

Coolidge got together with Keb’ Mo’ and Jill Colucci to write the ethereally haunting “Walking on Water.” “I love Keb’ Mo’s music,” Coolidge says. “Ross Hogarth, who produced the album, told me he thought I should go to Nashville to record with Keb’. We wrote for three days. The day I got there to his house I met Jill and got to know her. I knew Keb’ had practiced Buddhism, and I have been reading a lot of the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön’s books. This song grew out of our conversations about the nature of reality. There’s really nothing solid underneath us; we’re just walking on water.” Mo’s undulating side guitar flows under Coolidge’s vocals as she ponders: “Why do I care how people see me / Why do we wanna hold onto youth / What if the questions are the answers / Want if there’s no such thing as the truth?”

JT Thomas’s shimmering piano sparely opens “The Things We Carry” before its swelling instrumentation and vocals wash over us in a powerful and poignant meditation on loss and hope. Coolidge and Mo’ funk it up with a celebration of all-night loving “Naked All Night.”

Very simply, Safe in the Arms of Time celebrates life, love, happiness, joy, starting over, family, music. Coolidge demonstrates through these songs that she’s lost no power in her ability to have a way with a song, and on this album she turns our hearts inside out as she delivers her message that love is everywhere.

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