Blues-rocker Joan Osborne riding high on Dylan’s songs
Joan Osborne is riding high on the career front. Her new album, “Songs of Bob Dylan” — released on Osborne’s label, Womanly Hips Records — features the soulful vocalist putting an interpretive spin on the rock legend’s tunes.
Osborne culls 13 songs from Dylan’s vast oeuvre. She draws material from his folk era (“Masters of War”), his pioneering electric period (“Highway 61 Revisited”) and later work (“Dark Eyes” from the 1985 album “Empire Burlesque”).
Her ninth studio album was inspired by the singer’s two performance residencies at the Cafe Carlyle in New York City. Over a couple of twoweek stretches in 2016 and 2017, she appeared at the jazz and cabaret venue in her show “Joan Osborne Sings the Songs of Bob Dylan.”
“When we got the call to do the show, I was a little taken aback because I’m not really a cabaret singer,” Osborne says from Brooklyn. “I wanted to honor the history of the place, but I also wanted to do something that was right for me. That’s when I brought out this idea I had in the back of my mind about doing a songbook series. In the 1950s and ’60s, Ella Fitzgerald released a series where she would pick a songwriter or a writing team and do an entire album of that material. I always thought it would be great to do my own version and pick the writers I was drawn to.”
As she considered the songsmiths she wanted to cover, Bob Dylan was at the top of the list.
“I chose him partly because of the wealth of material,” she says. “You could do 100 Dylan songs and still not run out of great songs. I felt that would make our job easier in creating a series of shows out of his material — if you try one song and it doesn’t work for some reason, there are hundreds of others. Also, I love singing his songs. I’ve recorded some of Dylan’s songs before and have had the honor of singing with him a couple of times. It seemed like the right step to take.”
When Osborne brought the Dylan idea to the folks at the Carlyle, they were completely on board. Over her two residencies, she was joined onstage by Jack Petruzzelli on guitar and Keith Cotton on keyboards. The three collaborators — who also coproduced the album — decided on the front end that they didn’t want to mimic Dylan’s original versions. Instead, they took an expansive approach to the material and explored different and sometimes unexpected arrangements. Osborne and crew wanted to bring a fresh perspective to the work.
“The shows at the Carlyle became the impetus for doing the record,” she says. “We were able to test out the idea in a live setting.”
Performing the songs night after night in a small room was an exciting project for Osborne. It was a challenging one as well.
“I started to feel what an actor must feel when they do Shakespeare because the material is so rich and has so much depth,” she notes. “Everything is there — humor, romance, drama, cynicism, innocence. I felt so privileged to be able to do it.”