Joan Osborne

On her tenth studio album, the masterful Trouble and Strife, Joan Osborne has issued a clarion call. With stunning vocals, a diverse range of sonics, and incisive lyrics, this deeply engaging collection of new original songs is her response to “the crazy, chaotic times we’re living in,” she says, and “a recognition of the important role music has to play in this moment. Music has a unique ability to re-energize people and allow us to continue to hang on to that sense of joy of being alive.”

Since she broke through 25 years ago with the multi-platinum Relish and its touchstone mega-smash “One of Us,” the seven-time Grammy nominee has never played it safe. Osborne has followed her restless musical heart, exploring a diverse range of genres: pop rock, soul, R&B, blues, roots rock, gospel, funk, and country – all of which can be heard on Trouble and Strife, along with the Western side of C&W and a touch of glam and disco. “For a lot of the record, we were going for a ‘70s AM radio vibe,” says Osborne.  As for the lyrics, the songs “are the most political I’ve ever written,” she conveys of her first album of originals since 2014’s confessional Love and Hate.  Osborne also produced Trouble and Strife, primarily recorded in her basement studio in Brooklyn and released on the label she founded in 1991, Womanly Hips.

Tackling serious subject matter in her writing while crafting music to “uplift,” Osborne assembled “a great live band” (including several musicians who played on her acclaimed last album, Songs of Bob Dylan): guitarists Jack Petruzzelli, Nels Cline, and Andrew Carillo, keyboardist Keith Cotton, bassist Richard Hammond and drummer Aaron

Comess. For vocal harmonies, she enlisted exquisite vocalists Catherine Russell, Ada Dyer, Martha Redbone and Audrey Martells, whom she’s “had the great privilege to work with over many years.”  The result is a Trojan horse of a record – music that is energizing, melodic, and hummable, with lyrics that call out the corrupt, the despicable and the destructive.

Roots-rockin’ opener “Take It Any Way I Can Get It” inspires with the mandate “I’m still survivin’/I got to be dancin’”, propelled by a joyous gospel-tinged vocal attack backed by Wurlitzer and Southern-style intertwined guitars that dare you to sit still.  She co-wrote the funky “Never Get Tired (of Loving You)” with Richard Hammond and her partner Keith Cotton, propelled by Cotton’s Prophet 6 synth, for her teenaged daughter: a message of stability in an uncertain world. “That song has a serious subtext,” says Osborne, but its “cool, retro flavor hopefully makes it a joyful thing.” The gorgeous ballad “Whole Wide World” finds Osborne hitting impossibly high notes, its sound inspired by the Chi-Lites; its message “is about hanging on to hope and envisioning something better for the future.” Another early ‘70’s sound infuses the super-catchy “Boy Dontcha Know”: Osborne’s purring vocals are surrounded by a Spiders from Mars-era piano and Big Star-esque Mando-guitar; its singalong lyrics look at gender nonconformity and the obstacles one faces when born female.

Abuse of power is the subject of two of the angriest songs on Trouble and Strife, with their infectious sound imbuing the songs a la a wolf in sheep’s clothing: the bluesy stomp “Hands Off,” punctuated by distinctive guitar riffs, denounces corrupt exploiters of people and the planet.  “That Was A Lie,” with scornful lyrics buffeted by buoyant pop rock, castigates “those camera-ready mouthpieces for corrupt officials,” according to Osborne.

Texan Ana Maria Rea, whose family emigrated to America when she was a child, contributed spoken passages in her native tongue to the rhythmic “What’s That You Say.”  “She tells the story of her family coming from Mexico City, where her father had been kidnapped, to the U.S. and how difficult that was,” says Osborne. “Her message is ‘I’m not afraid,’ and her mission is to help other people who are in the same position she was in. Ana Maria is a shining light of a person.”

Escape from a place where “there’s nothin’ left alive” drives Osborne to “Panama,” a showcase of her vocal range expressing gut-punch lyrics reminiscent of Dylan at his most vitriolic. But it is the Western-flavored title track that Osborne points to as the song most inspired by her “Dylanology” concerts that began in 2016 and led to her 2018 covers album,  “If you spend that intensive time living with his songs, I think it just rubs off on you,” Osborne admits. “’Trouble and Strife’ betrays the Dylan influence the most because of the odd characters coming in and out of these absurd situations (much like the ones we find ourselves in today).”

Osborne’s years of experience as a seasoned road warrior are reflected throughout Trouble and Strife, the album. Her tenure with what she calls a “meat and potatoes rock ‘n roll band”, Trigger Hippy, shows up in “Meat and Potatoes,” a farewell collaboration with her former bandmates, cut in a Nashville studio: Written with Trigger Hippy bassist Nick Govrik, it features that group’s Southern-boogie groove. It’s a feel-good song extolling the virtue of downhome cookin’ – and lovin’. “

It’s been quite the journey since the woman AllMusic.com declared “the most gifted vocalist of her generation” moved from small-town Kentucky to attend NYU film school in the 1980s. Osborne’s astounding voice drew attention when she joined the fun at open mic nights in downtown clubs, which eventually led to 1995’s Relish, “that rare breed of album where critical consensus, popular approval and enduring appeal unite,” according to American Songwriter. Since then, she’s performed with Motown’s revered rhythm section the Funk Brothers and toured with the Dead (where she first met and sang with Dylan). She’s harmonized with Stevie Wonder at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, duetted with Luciano Pavarotti, and co-headlined a tour with the legendary Mavis Staples. She has amassed a loyal fan base as she’s continuously traveled the country. Through it all, she sees more clearly now than ever the essential role our troubadours play.

“I feel like music has this important job to do right now,” Osborne says. “Part of that job is to help imagine a better future – and to hang on to hope. I want to play for people and get them up on their feet and dancing. To let music do that thing it does – bring joy and energy because we really need that right now.” With Trouble and Strife, she intends to do just that.

On Songs of Bob Dylan, Joan Osborne unleashes her sizable gifts as a vocalist and interpreter upon The Bard’s celebrated canon. With performances honed by the time Osborne spent polishing them during “Joan Osborne Sings The Songs Of Bob Dylan” —  two critically acclaimed two-week residencies she performed at New York City’s Café Carlyle in March 2016 and 2017, the seven-time Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum-selling singer and songwriter, whom The New York Times has called “a fiercely intelligent, no-nonsense singer,” winds her supple, soulful voice around Dylan’s poetic, evocative lyrics, etching gleaming new facets in them along the way.

 

“I try not to do a straight-up imitation of what someone else has done,” Osborne says. “Like if you’re going to sing an Otis Redding song, you’re never going to out-Otis him so you shouldn’t even try. So I always try to find some unique way into the song, and also to pick songs where the intersection between the song and my voice hits some kind of sweet spot. It was a joy being able to sing these brilliant lyrics. It’s like an actor being given a great part. You are just so excited to say these lines because they’re so powerful that it lifts you up above yourself.”

 

The album spans Dylan’s beloved standards from the ’60s and ’70s (“Masters of War,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” “Buckets of Rain,” “Tangled Up In Blue”) to some of Osborne’s favorites from his later albums, including “Dark Eyes” (from 1985’s Empire Burlesque), “Ring Them Bells” (from 1989’s Oh Mercy), “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” (from 1997’s Time Out of Mind), and “High Water” (from 2001’s Love and Theft). “His versions are legendary and I’m not trying to improve on them,” Osborne says. “I’m just trying to sing beautiful songs and let people hear them. It’s about trying to give a different shade of meaning to something that’s already great. I happen to think Dylan is a great singer, but I will never, in a million years, sound like him, which almost made it easier.”

 

Unconstrained by any notion of trying to imitate or surpass Dylan, Osborne felt free to play with the songs’ arrangements, a process that was also enabled by the virtuosity and versatility of Osborne’s collaborators, guitarist Jack Petruzzelli (Patti Smith, The Fab Faux) and keyboardist Keith Cotton (Idina Menzel, Chris Cornell), who performed with her at Café Carlyle, and with whom she co-produced the album. “They bring this wealth of skills to the table,” she says. “Any crazy idea we came up with, they could do. So it was wonderful to have that level of musicianship at my fingertips.” Half the songs were recorded with the trio and the other half feature a full band.

 

In Osborne and her musicians’ hands, Dylan’s songs take on varied new shapes. His rollicking, bluesy classic “Highway 61 Revisited” gets a propulsive, radical makeover with a Middle Eastern vibe inspired by the song’s biblical imagery. The raucous, brass-band driven “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” (featuring the famous line “Everybody must get stoned”) is reinvented with a smoky, slinky late-night jazz-club feel that puts an entirely fresh spin on the song. “It allowed me to take a lyric that I think has been interpreted as very jokey and about just getting wasted and reframe it in a way where it has a bit of a different meaning,” she says. “Quinn the Eskimo (Mighty Quinn),” a song popularized by Manfred Mann, is subtly rearranged to bring out the gospel flavor, endowing it with a celebratory air that fully suits the song. “We’ve been opening our show with it and it’s just a wonderful ‘joyful noise’ sort of moment,” Osborne says.

 

On “Ring Them Bells,” Osborne retains the spiritual overtones of the original, though the song takes on new resonance given today’s political climate. “Oh Mercy is such a touchstone album for me,” she says. “I sang ‘Ring Them Bells’ at a couple of benefits for firefighters’ families right after 9/11 and, in that context, it was apparent how a song like that has the power to grab people’s emotions when we’re facing huge challenges. We’re living in a moment like that now, where there’s a lot of uncertainty and fear about what’s happening in the world. So it feels like the time to bring out a song like this. I’d say the same thing about ‘Masters of War.’ We need to hear the most powerful, political songs. We need to hear our great writers and poets talking about these times.”

 

Making Songs of Bob Dylan sprung from an idea Osborne had been toying with for some years: to record a series of Songbook albums, akin to Ella Fitzgerald’s eight-album series where the jazz singer interpreted the songs of Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, and others classic American Songbook writers. “I always thought it would be really interesting to update that idea and do something similar myself,” she says. So when she received the call from Café Carlyle, an intimate Upper East Side institution known for headlining performances by legendary interpretive singers like Judy Collins and the late Bobby Short, Osborne thought it might be the perfect venue to test it out. “I chose to start with Bob Dylan because of his stature as a writer,” she says. “And also because he has so many incredible songs. I’d never run out of ideas for different tunes to try.”

 

“Joan Osborne Sings The Songs Of Bob Dylan” was a smashing success with both fans and critics, who called it “magic,” and praised her as having “a style and wisdom that is all her own, which allows you to hear each of these brilliant songs as if for the first time.” The New York Times noted that “at every point in the evening, you had a sense of Ms. Osborne as an artist who knew exactly what she was doing.” Of course Osborne is no stranger to interpreting songs in a wide variety of genres. In addition to releasing a string of studio albums featuring her frank, expressive original songwriting (the 3x-platinum, 6-time Grammy-nominated Relish, Righteous Love, Pretty Little Stranger, Little Wild One, and Love and Hate), Osborne has also made three albums of soul, R&B, and blues covers (How Sweet It Is, Breakfast In Bed, which also features originals, and the Grammy-nominated Bring It On Home). AllMusic has called her “the most gifted vocalist of her generation and a singer who understands the nuance of phrase, time, and elocution.”

 

The Kentucky native famously got her start performing her own songs in New York City’s downtown rock clubs, around the time that she began to rediscover Dylan’s work with Oh Mercy. “When you’re playing in the nightclub scene in Greenwich Village, his trail is everywhere, and not just because he played in the same places, but because people still perform his music every night. He’s part of the American musical education you get, whether you’re learning about him in some music conservatory or by playing in bars five nights a week. During those years I started to become more familiar with his music. And at the point when I was starting to arrange my own stuff and make my own recordings, hearing records like ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ or ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ I thought, ‘Wow, that just has such an immediacy and freshness. How did he do that?’ It’s interesting to dig into it from that aspect, when music is your livelihood.”

 

In 2003, Osborne joined the surviving members of The Grateful Dead and had the chance to sing with Dylan, their co-headliner. “We performed ‘Tears of Rage,’ a song Dylan co-wrote with Richard Manuel,” Osborne says. “He came up to me after the show and said, ‘You know, I never liked that second verse, but I rewrote it. What do you think of these lyrics?’ And he read me the alternate lyrics that he’d apparently just written on this scrap of paper. I was so flabbergasted that Bob Dylan is standing there, we’re both sweaty from performing on this hot summer day in Indiana, and he’s asking me what I think of his lyric changes for this classic song. And all I could do was just say, ‘Oh yeah, that sounds good. I can hear that.’”

 

And what does Osborne think Dylan himself would think of her album? “Well, I would hope that he wouldn’t get pissed at me,” she says with a laugh. “I don’t think so. I mean, why write a song? He just released his third album of standards, so he must understand that a song desires to be sung, no matter who wrote it. It continues to live only if people sing it.”

Multi-platinum singer and songwriter, JOAN OSBORNE announces the release of her ninth studio album, Songs of Bob Dylan, set for release on September 1st, 2017. On Songs of Bob Dylan Joan Osborne unleashes her sizable gifts as a vocalist and interpreter upon Dylan’s celebrated canon with performances honed by Osborne’s time spent performing “Joan Osborne Sings The Songs Of Bob Dylan,” two critically acclaimed two-week residencies at New York City’s Café Carlyle in March 2016 and 2017.

 

Unconstrained by any notion of trying to imitate or surpass Dylan, Osborne felt free to play with the songs’ arrangements, a process that was also enabled by the virtuosity of Osborne’s collaborators, guitarist Jack Petruzzelli (Patti Smith, The Fab Faux) and keyboardist Keith Cotton (Idina Menzel, Chris Cornell), who performed with her at Café Carlyle, and with whom she co-produced the album.

 

The album spans Dylan’s beloved standards from the ’60s and ’70s (“Masters of War,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” “Buckets of Rain,” “Tangled Up In Blue”) to some of Osborne’s favorites from his later albums, including “Dark Eyes” (from 1985’s Empire Burlesque), “Ring Them Bells” (from 1989’s Oh Mercy), “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” (from 1997’s Time Out of Mind), and “High Water” (from 2001’s Love and Theft).

 

Songs of Bob Dylan is a follow up to the singer’s 2014 album, Love and Hate, and 2012’s Grammy-nominated Bring It On Home. AllMusic has called her “the most gifted vocalist of her generation and a singer who understands the nuance of phrase, time, and elocution.” The Kentucky native famously got her start performing her own songs in New York City’s downtown rock clubs, around the time that she began to rediscover Dylan’s work with Oh Mercy. In 2003, Osborne joined the surviving members of The Grateful Dead and had the chance to sing with Dylan, their co-headliner.