The acclaimed singer plays Grand Rapids Thursday for the first time in years, performing as a duo while touring behind her new album, “Love and Hate.” And check out what she’s listening to these days.
Live Spontaneity: Joan Osborne brings her duo tour to to a WYCE show at Wealthy Theatre on Thursday. (Photo/Jerome Brunet Photography)
For years, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Joan Osborne has boldly plunged into a startling array of styles with impressive results: rock, R&B, pop, gospel, Americana, blues, folk, country.
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She’ll bring that approach to Grand Rapids on Thursday, part of the tour behind her latest album, “Love and Hate,” which resonates with jazz, rock, soul and pop textures.
“I like a lot of different music and feel comfortable in a lot of different genres,” Osborne told Local Spins from a recent Wisconsin tour stop.
Osborne: Subtleties and intimacy in concert.
“For me, it was OK to let the content of the song dictate the style of it, as opposed to trying to work within one style. I’ve never really been somebody who sticks to one style, probably to my commercial detriment. I wanted the meaning of the songs to dictate the style. That’s why it’s eclectic.”
Eclectic also describes Osborne’s 25-year-career.
The singer literally has done it all in the music world, from scoring a Top 10 hit single with “One of Us” in 1995 to touring with The Funk Brothers, Phil Lesh and The Dead, to earning accolades for her interpretations of classic soul and blues tunes, to joining the Trigger Hippy rock band which features members of the Black Crowes and recently released its first full-length studio album.
With the “Love and Hate” and Trigger Hippy projects both getting released earlier this year, Osborne has spent months on the road, away from her family in New York City.
“Last year was more about being in the studio and completing these two different records, which is nice because I can stay home more. Being on the road more this year has been challenging. Being away from my (9-year-old) daughter and my family is a tougher thing,” she conceded.
“But at the same time, it’s gratifying to have these records out in the world and have new songs to play and … bring them directly to the people. Music doesn’t really live until you get on the stage and bring them to the audience.”
FIRST GRAND RAPIDS-AREA SHOW IN MORE THAN A DECADE
Osborne will do that in intimate fashion in Grand Rapids at 8 p.m. Thursday when she plays Wealthy Theatre as part of WYCE-FM Live at Wealthy concert series. She’ll perform as a duo with guitarist Keith Cotton, with whom she’s collaborated on songs, and who’s been a member of her band for six years.
Tickets are $40 day of show, with proceeds benefiting WYCE and Hospice of Michigan: Sound Service, bringing music into the homes of those in the final stages of life. The concert also features special guest Ruston Kelly. For tickets, visit grcmc.org online here.)
It’s Osborne’s first concert in the Grand Rapids area since playing The Pinnacle Center in Hudsonville with her band in 2001.
Osborne (Photo/Jeff Fasano)
“The duo thing is much more subtle, and as a singer, it’s challenging because you’re very exposed in a way,” she said. “You just have the piano or the guitar and your voice, and you can draw a lot of subtleties with the way you sing things, and there’s a lot of intimacy you can achieve with an audience. But if you make a mistake, there’s nowhere to hide.”
On the flip side, her concerts with Trigger Hippy – which resume later this month – are “more like a big rock ‘n’ roll show. In that situation, I’m more part of a collective. No one is a front person; everyone is a star in a way in that band. It’s a super high-energy show. I’m lucky that they (two different sorts of shows) balance each other.”
Osborne said audiences have responded enthusiastically to the cozy duo performances, which allow fans to really connect with her songs.
“For a lot of our fans, this is their favorite way to see material from the record. It’s a stripped-down, bare-bones, essential setting,” she said, noting there’s also room for “moments of spontaneity. With just myself and Keith, there are more opportunities to be spontaneous. We can be loose and free.”
BALANCING ‘LOVE & HATE’ WITH TRIGGER HIPPY
Osborne spent six years, on and off, writing and recording tunes for “Love and Hate,” her first album of original material since 2008’s “Little Wild One.” She and her band would work on “different pieces” of the album when schedules allowed and they weren’t on the road.
Joan Osborne, “Love and Hate”
“In a way, it allowed the record to become what it was supposed to be,” said Osborne, noting it started more as a project inspired by Van Morrison’s classic “Astral Weeks” and ended up being focused thematically on relationships once the title track was completed.
As for her hopes for the album, released in April: “My goals tend to be about the quality of the records. You can have ideas about where you want the music to go or how many fans you want to buy the music, but most of that is out of your control. What you control is the quality of what you’re doing and the depth of your writing and the details you put into the record – not to be satisfied until it was the best that it could be. If you’ve done your best, then you can be proud to take your music anywhere.”
Strangely, Osborne has never matched the commercial success of that first single, “One of Us,” from her first major label album, “Relish,” in the mid-1990s. It took five years and “a lot of complications” with record label battles before she released her next album, “Righteous Love,” in 2000.
“I think I was in a particularly unique situation having a really substantial hit with my first major label record,” she recalled. “I got so psyched out that I was a bit paralyzed in trying to make my second record because I thought it was incumbent on me to have another hit that was that big. It almost made it impossible for me to sit down and write.”
Reveling in the NYC Experience: Osborne.
Instead of seeking another hit, she should have concentrated on writing songs “that I wanted to hear and enjoyed,” she conceded. “But that being said, I did learn from that. You take your lumps and you learn from that. It’s not looking at this as a big mistake, but as learning the hard way.”
Born in Kentucky, Osborne has spent most of her career in New York City, where she has cultivated her diverse musical tastes and which inspired her songwriting.
“When I first moved to New York, it was a pretty mind-blowing experience,” she recalled. “But I love it because New York City is so open in a way, and there are people from every walk of life, every nationality, every sexual orientation, every fashion orientation, it’s all there happening on the street.
“If you go walk the street and look, you connect with 10 or 15 stories unfolding in front of you. As an artist, it’s incredibly inspiring. There’s a lot of little threads and ideas you can pick up and run with as a writer that you experience every day in New York. And you can go out any night and hear eight or 10 different styles of music.”
JOAN OSBORNE: THE LOCAL SPINS GUEST PLAYLIST
Local Spins asked Joan Osborne to list the top three albums that she’s listening to now. Here are her selections with comments about the artists. We’ve created a Spotify playlist of some songs from these records below, along with playlist of Osborne tunes spanning her illustrious career.
1. Sturgill Simpson, “Metamodern Sounds in Country Music” (2014) – With his voice, you close your eyes and swear he’s Waylon Jennings. He’s got this old-school country style, but his songwriting is very interesting. (He references) Tibetan Buddhism and spirituality and metaphysical understandings of the universe. It’s not your typical country music lyrical content.
2. Ryan Adams, “Ryan Adams” (2014) – I’m a big fan.
3. Marissa Nadler, “July” (2014) – I’ve been listening to this woman, Marissa Nadler, who has just a beautiful voice and it’s very soothing and it’s great night music to have on and at home relaxing.
THE LOCAL SPINS PLAYLIST: JOAN OSBORNE’S CAREER OF DIVERSITY
Copyright 2014, Spins on Music LLC
