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The wild one
With a new pop album, Joan Osborne explores New York City’s soul
by Ben Corbett
I remember being in the vocal booth and feeling transported,” says Joan Osborne. “I had this image in my mind of this postcard that I had seen years ago of an Indonesian spiritual ritual where dozens and dozens of people sit in a circle, almost like a wheel, and they’re all reaching in the same direction towards the outside of the wheel and it makes this sea of hands. That image stuck when I was singing the vocals for ‘Can’t Say No,’ and from there it just kind of flowed into this crazy video in my mind.”
The ritual Osborne speaks of is the Kecak Dance, a millennia-old, primordial, all-male ceremony from the jungles of Bali. That the imagery of this ritual would come to her during the recording of “Can’t Say No,” a track from her new September release, Little Wild One, is an uncanny coincidence, an almost too perfect deja vu that defies geography. And it makes sense considering Osborne’s new album is a quasi-tribute to New York City that gathers the timeless primordial pulse of America’s cultural capital in an 11-song capsule.
Others have traveled this road before — for instance Miles Davis with his final studio album, Doo Bop, which captures the city in a Koyaanisqatsi-esque jazz tapestry of sound. Osborne’s, though, is a pop album that has as much lyrically to do with her own New York experience as it does the universal appeal to anyone who has stumbled through Soho or crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in the twilight hours, whether today or under the gas lamps of a century ago. For Osborne, a Kentuckian, New York is the place of her spiritual birth into music.
“It really was kind of an accident,” she says of her stumbling into a musical career in the late 1980s. “I was in New York City, going to New York University and studying to become a documentary filmmaker. I got invited out to a club by a neighbor, and we went out for some drinks to hear some blues music. The band had finished by the time we got there, but there was a piano player who was still playing for the few people who were still in the club. My friend dared me to go up and sing a song with this piano player. And I did. I went and sang a Billie Holiday song [‘God Bless the Child’], and he said, ‘That’s pretty good. You should come back to our open mic night.’ I started taking all the money that I should have been spending on college tuition and buying Etta James and Howlin’ Wolf records and steeping myself in that music. Eventually I realized that I wasn’t going to go back. That this was the path that I was on.”
For Osborne, this path has led across many genres and styles, beginning with blues and segueing into soul, R&B, a stint studying under the Indian master Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and even branching off into country music with her 2006 release, Pretty Little Stranger, a record of half covers and half originals, that was influenced by a fork in the road she took in 2003, when invited to become a vocalist for The Dead on their first full reunion tour after Jerry Garcia’s death. The Dead, known for both their country/bluegrass styles and improvisational jazz-rock were a perfect fit for Osborne.
“Just playing in clubs, you learn how to think on your feet,” she says. “So the fact that The Dead were really improvisational didn’t really throw me. It was kind of exciting, like being back in the clubs where the musicians will throw you a curve at any minute. It’s a very playful thing. So it was more like revisiting a territory that I was familiar with and excited by. But I do think that in particular their country and bluegrass influences sparked me in my writing. Pretty Little Stranger [which includes a cover of The Grateful Dead’s ‘Brokedown Palace’] was informed by learning all of those Dead tunes. Through the course of doing that tour, I became a Deadhead, and now I’m a big fan of all that material. They have such a great catalog of songs. I didn’t know them when I was hired, so I really had to just study everyday for whatever the set was going to be that night and learned a lot from that concentrated study of such a great body of work.”
A couple years after The Dead disbanded and went their separate ways, remembering the positive experience with Osborne’s hippie-shaking, raucous blues vocals and vibrant stage presence, Dead bassist Phil Lesh invited Osborne to go back on tour with his road band, Phil Lesh & Friends. Osborne jumped at the opportunity.
“For me it was great to get back in front of that audience again. I had never experienced the kind of just intensity that the fans have. In the beginning when I was going out with The Dead, I was worried that the fans were not going to embrace me. I was nervous taking that spot, but everybody was so welcoming to me and so warm, and I think they were just excited that somebody was helping their guys to bring that music back to them again. So for me that was really a wonderful experience, and it was nice to go out and see those fans again and sing those songs again with Phil.”
After several years of touring under the Dead umbrella and maintaining her own solo career, Osborne followed up Pretty Little Stranger with 2007’s Breakfast in Bed, another half-cover/half-original stew of soul music, a staple of Osborne’s genre-checkered career, including covers of “(Your Love is Like a) Heatwave,” “Midnight Train to Georgia,” and Bill Wither’s “Ain’t No Sunshine.” Osborne’s new record, Little Wild One, despite the “pop” category, deviates greatly from anything in her past, including her first and multi-platinum selling 1995 pop record, Relish, with the hit that earned her international acclaim “(What if God Was) One of Us.”
“The last couple of months of recording were pretty difficult because I had just gotten pregnant with my daughter and was enduring morning sickness 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” says the soul/R&B diva and now mom. “I couldn’t really tell the guys, because you’re not really supposed to tell people right away, just in case something happens with your pregnancy. I was just trying to fight back the nausea and work on the vocals and the songs and say intelligent things during the mixing and just was feeling awful.”
You wouldn’t know it listening to the album. With a wider range of instruments, from Wurlitzer to Hurdy Gurdy, and with a rhythmic rather than melodic essence dominating the tracks, Osborne has bitten off a wider swath of musical territory that, although subtle at times, incorporates all of the styles explored throughout her career.
“I just started to collaborate again with the same guys that I worked with on the Relish album,” explains Osborne. “One of the guys, [guitarist and multi-instrumentalist] Eric Bazilian, and I got together and tried our hand at some writing. It seemed to be working well, and eventually the other guys got involved. So doing a pop album was a result of working with those guys again and being in that familiar setting. They push me off balance in a way that can be a little frustrating, but also very stimulating creatively, because in my search to right myself again after they push me off balance, I will find some path that I never would have found on my own in my comfort zone. My grounding is in American roots music. Those kinds of music are what I studied on my own when I was playing in those clubs. So that feels like a pretty familiar territory to me. When I do a pop record like Little Wild One, those strains are just there. That just happens naturally.”
No surprise for the multi-talented cross-genre explorer, who comes full circle with Little Wild One, not only returning to praise the city where she discovered her true calling, but to the sound that launched her into initial popularity. Or as Osborne, who was reading American poetry when writing the songs, explains: “The album’s opening track, ‘Hallelujah in the City,’ is a riff on the idea of the city as a spiritual place. The idea comes up in Walt Whitman’s and Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, the concept that the shared bond of humanity of all the citizens, all their interactions, adds up to the unique environment of the soul.”
On the Bill
Joan Osborne and John Hiatt will perform at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 9, at the Chautauqua Auditorium, 900 Baseline Rd., Boulder,
303-440-7666.
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