Joan Osborne has been covering Bob Dylan songs since “Man in the Long Black Coat” on her debut studio album “Relish” in 1995. Now, she’s bringing Dylan back to Atlanta.
Osborne is celebrating her live album “Dylanology (Live)” with a show on July 14 at City Winery at Ponce City Market. The album includes cuts from live shows promoting Osborne’s 2017 album, “Songs of Bob Dylan.”
Covering a Dylan song is no small feat, but the tracks on “Dylanology (Live)” feel fresh, bringing something new to the master songwriter’s work. Ahead of the show, Rough Draft Atlanta spoke with Osborne about her connection to Dylan and his work, and what it feels like to celebrate “Relish” – which contained the worldwide hit “One of Us” – 30 years later.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I wanted to talk about this album and how it came together. I read that you were looking through your archive and coming across some old recordings. Could you talk a little bit about that process and how you decided which songs from those recordings to include on this live album?
Joan Osborne: I have these closets and closets full of stuff, and then I also have hard drives full of stuff that I’ve collected over the years. Every once in a while, if I’ve got some time, I’ll start combing through them. Or if I’m sitting at my computer, and I’m searching for something, then some other thing will pop onto the screen and I’ll be like, “Oh, what’s that? I forgot that we did that.”
I think that it was probably one of those situations, where I was searching for one thing and then this audio of this live show from 2018 came up. I was like, what does this sound like? It turned out to be from one of these Dylanology shows that we did in 2018, where we had put out a studio album of Bob Dylan’s songs. In order to celebrate that release, we wanted to do something a little more special than just me going out and singing the song from the record. We wanted to expand it a bit, so we invited some special guests – Amy Helm, Jackie Green, Robert Randolph – and turned this into a big party.
I read in that same interview that you normally don’t like how live tracks sound, but something about these stuck with you. I agree, I think they sound great – but I was curious, what do you think that quality is, why don’t you normally like what they sound like?
Osborne: I’m not as bad about this as I used to be. I used to be incredibly judgmental, and my own worst critic. Even a good performance, if there was some little thing where I didn’t get the right pitch on a note, or I didn’t like the phrasing, or whatever – to me, the whole thing was ruined, and I was ready to toss it out. I’m less like that these days.
When you’re in a live show, part of the great thing about it, and part of the not great thing about it, is that it exists only in that moment. After that, it’s gone completely. I’m not used to having these recordings to listen back to. I mean, I’ve certainly done it before in my life, but I tend to make the recordings and then put them away, and think that I’m going to listen to them, and then I don’t, because I don’t want to. This was the exception to that. I’m doing that more and more these days, whether it’s studio outtakes or live stuff. I’m a little more forgiving of myself and feeling like, you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bath water. If something is not perfect, that doesn’t mean it’s not still worthwhile, or even excellent.
What do you think helped you come out of that perfectionist mindset? Asking for a friend.
Osborne: [Laughs] I think being less afraid of being judged – you know, when you’re younger, I think you want to please everyone, or appear to be perfect and flawless. All these things, they just spring from a sense of insecurity about your own worth. The older I get, the less I really worry about that kind of stuff. I am who I am, and I’ve worked my entire life and try to do the best that I could. Whether that meets someone else’s approval or not, it kind of is what it is. There’s not a lot I’m going to be able to do to be somebody else, or to change that at this point in my life. So I just try to look at things from the perspective of, alright – what’s good about this? Not what’s imperfect about it, but what’s good about this? Is it communicating something? Does it have emotion? Does it have soul? Those are the things that I think people care about more than something being perfect.
You’ve covered a lot of Dylan’s songs, and other artists’ songs in general. How do you go about choosing which songs you’d like to cover? What makes a song ripe for interpretation, or a different interpretation?
Osborne: It’s a very instinctive process for me. I am very much drawn to certain songs, and I’m not sure I could even tell you why, but I just feel very moved by them, and want to sing them. That’s kind of the first step, is what do I just naturally gravitate towards? Then it becomes a trial and error process of, okay, now that I’ve chosen this song, what can I bring to it that is unique to me, that can make the song live in a way that it hasn’t before, or bring out some shade of meaning that other versions have not provided before?
You don’t want to just try to imitate something that’s gone before, because what’s the point? You want to be able to allow the song to live through you in the moment that you sing it in some unique way. I’ll try to do things with different arrangements, with different tempos, put them in different keys – just play around with things in that way until I feel like I’ve hit some kind of emotional sweet spot where the combination of my voice and the song blossoms in some way. You know when that happens, and you know when it doesn’t happen. If you’ve tried it six ways from Sunday and it doesn’t work, then you’re just like, okay – maybe I can love this song, but I don’t have to sing it.
The great thing about doing this project with the songs of Bob Dylan is that there’s always another great song right behind the one that you’re working on. He just has so many amazing and beautiful songs, and there’s so much. Even somebody like me who knows his catalog fairly well, there’s always something more to discover.
What draws you to Bob Dylan as an artist? I’ve heard you say that it wasn’t necessarily an immediate connection.
Osborne: There are things about Dylan as an artist and as a persona that can be somewhat forbidding. As a female, some of the songs that he wrote in his 60s heyday seemed to me to be somewhat vicious, and I wasn’t connecting with that so much. But just because there’s a particular song that makes me feel like, wow, he’s really punching down here, why does he need to do that? That doesn’t mean that there aren’t dozens or hundreds of other songs that don’t have compassion and generosity. He’s able to write all different kinds of songs. He’s able to write political songs. He’s able to write heartbreaking love songs. Especially recently, I think the records that he’s put out in the last dozen years or so, are very humorous. He’s a very multifaceted artist, and the more that you dig into it, the more you realize that it’s almost infinite, what you can find and what you can discover.
You’ve picked some work I would consider a bit overlooked, like there’s some songs from the 80s. What do you think it is about that era that causes people to overlook those songs?
Osborne: I think he was not the cultural figure in the 80s that he had been before. People might have only known him for that moment of cultural primacy that he achieved, and might think, oh, I like those records. But … he’s changed now, or the last record that I bought wasn’t like those ones that I liked before. Whatever it is. People’s careers have ups and downs, and I think he was in a little bit of a period where he just wasn’t that famous anymore, and he wasn’t that successful right in that moment. I think that when the culture moves on and you’re not making big radio hits anymore, it’s easy for people to miss some of the things that you’re doing.
But for me, the first album of his that I really connected with as a whole was the album, “Oh Mercy.” I bought that when I was in Paris for the first time in my life in my mid 20s, and was singing on the street with this band of street musicians, and we were sleeping in squats – it was just this sort of crazy, romantic time in my life. I walked past a music store and saw that he had a new record out. I was curious, and bought the cassette, and put it in my little red Radio Shack cassette player, and was just transported by it. I still think it’s a fantastic record. Songs like “Shooting Star,” songs like “Everything is Broken” – it’s an amazing piece of work. You could have an entire career, and if that was your best record, you’d be happy with that. For Bob Dylan, it’s just one of many, and not even his best or most famous. But I was really taken away by that record, so I have an appreciation for all the different phases of his career.
Do you have a particular favorite recording on this live album?
Osborne: I think it depends on the day. It depends on the mood that I’m in. The recording of “Buckets of Rain” is, you know – talk about not being perfect. It’s a duet between myself and Amy Helm, and we just sort of get lost in this moment and break each other up. You know, the song almost goes off the rails. I sort of hesitated for a moment to include it on the record. But then I thought, well, this is the kind of thing that makes people feel like they are sitting in the audience at a live show – when you see people’s masks of profession drop, and it’s more relaxed. It’s more about really just having fun together. I think [“Buckets of Rain”] really conveys that.
I think our version of “Highway 61 Revisited,” the arrangement that we did, I think is pretty unique. I quite like that. I like a lot of them.
I was going to call out “Highway 61 Revisited” for the same reason. I think “Ballad of Hollis Brown” is pretty awesome as well.
Osborne: That’s a very powerful song, and one that was not on our studio album. That was another thing that I wanted, to not just confine ourselves to the songs that have been on the studio album, but to let the special guests suggest things, and to follow their lead on some stuff. That might have been something that Jackie Green brought in, was “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” That also was a really intense moment in the show. So, you balance that out with something like “Buckets of Rain,” which is much more light hearted, and it gives you a little bit of an impression of just the breadth of what Dylan is capable of doing.
Your record “Relish” turns 30 this year. How has it been for you to celebrate that milestone, as well as looking back at the record and its impact?
Osborne: As far as celebrating the milestone, I had gone into the studio just a few weeks ago with my friend Christian McBride, who is a jazz bass player. We got together with a bunch of jazz musicians and re-recorded all of the songs from “Relish” with more of a jazz flavor. That was incredibly fun. For me, it was an affirmation of the quality of the songs and of how the songs themselves did not feel dated. They didn’t feel like they belonged only to a certain period of time. In these new versions, they felt very fresh, and they felt very relevant. I could tell from the way that the musicians were responding to them that they still had the ability to move people emotionally. So for me, that was a great thing and a great way to celebrate the record. Hopefully that project is going to come out either at the end of this year or at the beginning of next year.
As far as looking back at the impact that it had, I still sing many of the songs from that record in my live shows, and whenever I meet fans or people who come to see the show afterwards, a lot of times the conversation turns to that record and to particular songs from that record. People tell me stories about what that record has meant to them, about experiences in their life that that record has been a part of, about dark moments that they were in where a particular song really pulled them out of that. For me, the legacy of the record is in the fans’ responses to it, and in those stories that people carry around with them of what that music has meant to them. That’s what any artist wants, is to know that the work that they’ve done has had some kind of an impact on people.