I Can't Make You Love Me

In August 2000, Mojo magazine voted "I Can't Make You Love Me" the eighth best track on its list of the 100 greatest songs of all time, and four years later Rolling Stone ranked it number 339 on its own tally of the 500 greatest songs. The Grammy Hall of Fame announced its induction of the recording on November 27, 2016, alongside 24 other songs. By then the ballad had long been a fixture of adult contemporary radio.

The song was written by Nashville writers Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin, who reportedly first conceived it as a fast bluegrass number before slowing it down and finding new power in the material. Its inspiration came from a newspaper article about a man living under a bridge in Nashville whose wife collected him from there, drove him to the courthouse for a divorce, and left him with the observation that a woman cannot be made to love someone. Reid and Shamblin considered offering the song to Bette Midler or Linda Ronstadt before it reached Bonnie Raitt, who recorded it for her eleventh album, Luck of the Draw, released in 1991.

Raitt co-produced the track with Don Was and cut her vocal in a single take, later explaining that the song was too sad for her to recapture the emotion a second time. Bruce Hornsby supplied the piano fills, with Tony Braunagel on drums and bassist James "Hutch" Hutchinson completing the rhythm section. The single reached number 18 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 6 on the Adult Contemporary chart.