For all songs considered and WNXP, I'm Julie Height.

Bonnie Rape has been a cultivator of emotional complexity, subtle heat, and supple groove for a good long while.

I can barely raise my head off of pillow.

Some days I never get out of bed.

I start out with the best of intentions and then shocking instead.

Half a century after releasing her self-titled debut, she's back with the first album of her 70s.

It's called Just Like That, and it's the work of a career artist whose perspective has only deepened with time

and whose drive remains undiminished.

Rape is a model of continuity.

She's been leading the same core band for decades, presiding over recording sessions,

and carefully selecting the songs she wants to interpret.

This time, she did a little more writing herself and added a couple of poignant, closely observed story songs to the satisfyingly well-rounded mix.

She says that she navigated COVID lockdown and had recording gear brought to a studio in Northern California where she lives to make just like that.

The thing about Pro Tools and Digital Recording now is it's very mobile.

You can really record in the middle of anywhere.

It frees us up tremendously to be able to record part of the record at home in different locations which worked great for COVID because we couldn't be in the same place.

We found a window right after everyone got vaccinated, and I said let's just make the use of the time and get in the studio.

So by the time people flew in from my band and my engineer drove up with his Pro Tools kit,

and we plugged it all into the local recordings studio that we rented, and we were able to have live music play to make the record in a short period of time.

And we even did some overdubs remotely when the band members went back home, so it's made it so much more easy to make records economically and safely, especially with COVID.

I know you have done tons of producing over the last three decades, but it's typically been in collaboration with another co-producer or to not this time.

How would you say that this album reflects the fact that you alone were the one really shaping it in that way as producer?

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