Joan Osborne – In the shadows of Nashville
“I hadn’t spent much time in Nashville and didn’t know what to expect there,” said Osborne. “But I was welcomed with open arms by everyone, including the country DJs, who were interested in hearing what I was doing. And Dolly sent over a batch of collard greens and barbecue to feed us.”
In writing for the album, Osborne was determined to educate herself in the art of constructing songs. “I’ve never been a craft person,” she says. “I never set out to craft a hit. So I don’t have to tell you how pleased I was that they picked ‘Who Divided’ as the first single.”
Though many people assume Osborne wrote “One Of Us”, it was penned by backing musician Eric Bazilian, who also came up with the wistful guitar lines that figure so greatly in the song’s appeal. An add-on to Relish, the song had little to do with the earthier tunes on the rest of the album, including the feverish “St. Teresa”, which Osborne did write. But far from bemoaning the commercial expectations created by “One Of Us”, she credits the song for leading her to artistically rewarding places.
“That song had such an unusual appeal,” she says. “It went beyond any one style or audience and made me welcome in all sorts of different worlds. I was invited to do a lot of amazing things as a result of that.
“I didn’t plan on jumping around from one arena to the next. But I love so many different kinds of music, I don’t find it difficult to go from one world to the next. That is not a wise thing, commercially. If I had tried to plan for a career, I would have tried to get deeper and deeper into one world. But you just do not know what is the best thing for you. I’m thankful I can still do this. Not too many people [who] had one single hit on the charts are still able to this far down the road. Somewhere along the way, I decided it was not such a good thing to be hugely successful and famous, anyway.”
A modest success, How Sweet It Is didn’t yield anything to equal “What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted”. Produced by John Leventhal between projects with Rosanne Cash (his wife) and Shawn Colvin, it was just smart and controlled enough in treating tunes such as Sly & the Family Stone’s “Everybody Is A Star”, the Undisputed Truth’s “Smiling Faces Sometimes” and Otis Redding’s “These Arms Of Mine” to not draw the attention it deserved.
“We wanted to reconfigure them so they’d be heard as songs again,” says Osborne. “You’d be a fool to try and outsing Aretha on ‘Think’. We wanted to let the song emerge from behind the classic performance and take on another life.” Marvin Gaye’s title song was slowed down and shifted to a minor key to give it poignancy. The psychedelic overcurrents of Jimi Hendrix’s “Axis: Bold As Love” became personal undercurrents. Here, she said, were modern treatments aimed at a modern audience.
When Osborne signed up with Lesh’s traveling band in the fall of 2005, her reputation as an accomplished singer who thrived in live situations and could adapt to different musical settings long preceded her. It’s fair to say, though, she didn’t know quite what she was getting into when she made her first appearance with them at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco. “I’m not a Deadhead,” she says. “This is not something I ever thought I’d do.”
The challenge was not so much fitting in with the grizzled veterans, but mastering a giant catalogue of songs. The band is famous for overhauling its set list every night, mixing up Grateful Dead classics with blues favorites, Allman Brothers and Rolling Stones songs, and the like. “I was like a worker bee learning them,” she says. “They’d give me an iPod every day of the songs they were gonna do that night and I’d spend all my time getting them down. It was like being in boot camp.
“I appreciated the whole scene, though, and respected their work immensely. Being on the road with them was kind of like hanging out with these eccentric uncles. They all had different side projects going, but with their 40 years of shared history, they relate to each other in an amazing way.”
Curiously, considering the tonnage of songs that came into play, they wouldn’t let Osborne sing one of her personal favorites among Dead classics, “Brokedown Palace” (written by Jerry Garcia and longtime Dead lyricist Robert Hunter). “I’d bring it up and was basically told it was not part of the process,” she says. She got even by recording the song on Pretty Little Stranger, in a stunning version that may well change their minds if she ever goes out with them again.
“A lot of the Dead’s songs have a country flavor, especially the ones on Workingman’s Dead and American Rose,” she notes. “I think they were partly responsible for getting me to do Pretty Little Stranger. But I had been surrounded by country, opening for the Dixie Chicks [on their Bush-whacking tour] and being around Willie Nelson when we were both opening for the Dead.”
Along with Lesh, Osborne was one of nearly two dozen artists who participated in a Bob Dylan tribute in November at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall. Critic Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times that her “radiant” treatment of “Make You Feel My Love” succeeded in “finding all the longing” in the song, a recent, unsung classic from Time Out Of Mind.
“For all the differences in Motown and country and rock and whatever, there’s a common thread,” Osborne says. “I always get this image in my mind of globes, of traditions reaching to their center and meeting there. As human beings, we discover again and again what we look for in music, spiritually and in other ways. It’s all about expressing the inexpressible.”
ND contributing editor Lloyd Sachs, who swears he has seen God on the 22 bus in Chicago, laughing at Wrigley Field as they drove past, is a longtime pop and jazz writer.