Joan Osborne Changes With the Decades

Joan Osborne spent the toughest months of the pandemic the same way a lot of other folks did. “Doing way too much baking and eating of baked goods!” she says with a laugh, her voice crackling over the phone. “For the first time in my life, I have high cholesterol, so I’ve just gone way overboard.”

There might have been some extra stress involved, too, as she spent the middle of 2020 finishing up her 10th studio album, Trouble and Strife, for her own Womanly Hips label. Osborne wrote and produced the record, mostly in her basement studio in Brooklyn, New York, where the seven-time Grammy nominee, now 58, lives with her partner, musician Keith Colton, and her 16-year-old daughter.

Trouble and Strife, which leans heavily on the turbulence of today’s social and political climate, is Osborne’s first album of new songs since 2014’s Love and Hate and the interpretive Songs of Bob Dylan, her 2017 tribute, which tied into two engagements at New York’s Café Carlyle.

It was studying Dylan, she says, and how his work uses characters, surreal lyrics and intimate situations to remain relevant through time, that made her think she might be able to craft overtly political material. Worrying about the future of her daughter when democracy itself seemed on the brink also spurred her on, and she emerged from a writing flurry of four days with almost all the songs.

“I also have a platform as an artist, where it’s not a huge platform, but whatever platform I have, I can put in service to this notion of being a better citizen,” she says.

On the album, Osborne layers her strong and urgent vocals over a ’70s AM radio vibe, a decision she says that had two purposes, one as a means of presenting the “really strong meat” of the lyrics in a way that went down easily.

“I wanted to make sure that listening to the record was not like listening to a lecture. It had to be a pleasurable experience, whether you connected with the political message or not.”

“To me, 1970s AM radio had a certain amount of joy in it, and also a real eclectic spirit. You would hear Charlie Rich and then the Rolling Stones. And then you might hear the Meters and then the Chi-Lites. It was all mixed up in there together. So I felt it had this real pleasure to it, and also this variety, where I could pick and choose in these different styles.”

The format also works well for delivering the scornful, barbed humor that punctuates several of the songs. But Osborne also conveys tender moments, such as in her meditation on human rights.

The churning blues of “What’s That You Say,” for example, spotlights the difficulties of mass immigration and the inhumane conditions at the U.S. southern border. She imbues it with an evocative Spanish-language recitation by the real-life Ana Marie Rea, who came to the U.S. from Mexico with her family seeking asylum after her father’s kidnapping.

“I sat and interviewed her remotely,” Osborne explains of the process. “She went to a recording studio in Texas, and I talked to her over the phone. It was a really emotional thing for her. Both of us were in tears at different points.”

Osborne changes gears on “That Was a Lie,” a puckish pop-rocker. The song skewers certain cable TV news channels and their plasticized celebrity hosts (“There ain’t no difference ’tween a mask and your face”) who peddle misinformation to a gullible audience. “That’s my response to the professional liars, the ones who get all dolled up and camera-ready, and then stand up and deliberately lie for their living,” she explains. “It just makes me furious.”

And “Boy Dontcha Know,” another of the album’s highlights, employs the sexual swagger of David Bowie to address gender politics, misogyny and sexism through the story of a modern trans boy. Osborne, who has long been involved in projects to spotlight the oppression of women, came to the song after reading about young children who wanted to transition. She thought about the societal forces, including the global violence against women, that might influence such a decision.

“I thought, ‘Wow, that kind of ring trues to me, because if you are a particular young girl who’s growing up in Western culture, or many cultures, and you see what the reality is of being an adult woman, it’s not necessarily the greatest thing,’ ” she says, laughing. “You can see that misogyny and sexism are still real, and as much as we tell girls, ‘You can be anything you want, and you can do anything you want,’ there’s that message that they’re getting. But then there’s also — they can see from just watching the news or the culture or whatever — that there’s a whole other side of it, and that it’s not always this bed of roses, and there’s violence against women, and there’s sexism and misogyny, and that’s reality, too.”  

Her own upbringing, as the second of six children of a general contractor and an interior decorator in the privileged Louisville suburb of Anchorage, Kentucky, was, she says, close to idyllic.

“When I was little kid, it was really like living in a small town where everybody knew everybody, and nobody locked their doors, and there was a lot of free roaming around. I think maybe that gave me the sense that the world was basically a safe place. And that it’s okay to take risks, that certainly I could fall on my face, but the consequences wouldn’t be too terrible.”

After performing in theater in Louisville, she moved to New York to study film at NYU. Inspired by blues and soul women such as Etta James and Aretha Franklin, she sat in on open-mic nights in the thriving club scene before going on the road. Her first album, Relish, appeared in 1995. The response blew Osborne, with her corkscrew curls and fashionable nose ring, off her feet. The single “(What If God Was) One of Us,” written by Eric Bazilian (of The Hooters), racked up three Grammy nominations and reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The album as a whole also snagged a nomination, as did two other songs. That level of fame, with people following her on the street, made Osborne uncomfortable, and the success was a tough act to follow, even as another Grammy nomination, for best blues album. came with 2013’s Bring It on Home.

That early success has allowed her to enjoy a lengthy career, and experiences such as singing live with the late opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti (“Gesu Bambino”) and doing a duet with Dylan (“Chimes of Freedom”).

“My take on it these days is that if it’s a problem,” she sums up, “it’s a pretty good problem to have.”

Osborne’s post-pandemic touring began May 1 at New York’s City Winery, with more shows scheduled for this summer and a co-bill with Madeleine Peyroux in the fall.

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