The acclaimed singer and songwriter plays St. Cecilia Music Center on Thursday. Local Spins catches up with Osborne, who still has a lot of irons in the musical fire.
On the Road Again: Joan Osborne brings ‘Dylanology Live’ to St. Cecilia Music Center this week. (Photo/Laure Crosta)
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After more than 35 years in the music business – sharing stages with the likes of The Dead, Mavis Staples, Stevie Wonder, The Funk Brothers, Phil Lesh and Lucinda Williams – Joan Osborne still revels in the unparalleled joy of performing live.
“My first love for doing this was live performing and that’s kind of been the constant over my entire career,” she said in a recent telephone interview with Local Spins.
“At this point, the only way that I know to make a living from doing this is to continue to perform live and continue to tour. And I still love it. … Right now, I don’t feel like I want to slow down at all and I still really enjoy it. The traveling can be hard, and as you get older, it’s harder on your body, but the reward of being able to do the shows and just the camaraderie of being with the audience and the musicians, it’s a nice way to live. That’s kind of the through line with me.”
Osborne, 63, brings that love of performing to Grand Rapids on Thursday, playing St. Cecilia Music Center as part of her “Sings the Songs of Bob Dylan” tour. Tickets – $35-$65 – for the 7:30 p.m. show are available online here.
And while Osborne – who first made a splash with her Grammy Award-nominated, 1995 debut album, “Relish” – has weathered a blizzard of changes in the music industry over the past three decades, nothing can replicate the live music experience.
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“There is this sort of irreplaceable thing about going to see live music. AI (artificial intelligence) is not going to be able to reproduce a concert experience, for you to be in a room full of people and watch a band or watch an artist. … There’s still a bit of a safe harbor for musicians in that experience and for audiences, too.
“You can only be connected with technology so long before you start to understand that it’s got its downside (with) the mental health piece, especially with young people who are living their lives digitally so much. It’s not a positive thing. So I feel like the live music experience is kind of an antidote for that as well. You can’t be sitting and looking at your phone and then be fully present for a live show. You need to be there and that’s an experience that you’re not going to get from your laptop or your phone or whatever.”
For this tour, Osborne – a vocalist regarded as a consummate interpreter of music – once again is concentrating on performing the music of the legendary Bob Dylan, something she embraced with her 2017 album, “Songs of Bob Dylan.” (She followed that with “Dylanology Live” in 2025.)
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Performing as a trio with guitarist Jack Petruzelli and keyboardist Will Bryant, Osborne will unfurl Dylan material “in a way that maybe no one else can do it, because I try to do something unique with the songs every time,” noted the singer, who’s worked with Dylan a couple of times and appreciates his “restless energy and intelligence.”
The repertoire on Osborne’s tour ranges from “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” to “Love Sick,” “Shooting Star” and “Buckets of Rain.”
Osborne: Releasing a jazz version of ‘Relish’ later this year. (Photo/Hugo Perez Ortiz)
“He is kind of a Shakespeare-level genius,” she said of Dylan. “He has so many songs that he’s written and continues to write over the course of all these decades. So it’s a very deep well, and it’s one that rewards you when you go back again and again.”
The trio puts its own stamp on this material, she added.
“We put out a pretty big sound for the three of us. But we also … have the ability to do these very intimate songs, and Bob Dylan has written some of the most beautiful love songs there are,” she said.
“We have the ability to do these very intimate songs, and then we also have the ability to rock out a little bit. So we are able to do a wide spectrum of things with the great musicians that I’m bringing with me.”
The show also will feature some of Osborne’s original songs “because people who come to see our shows … also want to hear a little bit of my material.”
That material often includes songs from the acclaimed “Relish,” which produced the hit single, “One of Us,” among other tracks.
Indeed, Osborne is revisiting that album in an inventive way in 2026: She’s teamed up with celebrated jazz bassist and composer Christian McBride to record a jazz version of the album titled, “Relish Reimagined,” which gets released in September.
“The two of us took all the songs from the ‘Relish’ album and rearranged them, and we went into the studio and re-recorded them with this group of incredible jazz players,” Osborne said.
“I have to say, even though it was recorded over 30 years ago, it (‘Relish’) doesn’t feel dated to me. It had its own style and its own thing and it was very much influenced by the fact that I sang a lot of blues in these clubs and a lot of soul music, and was very much listening to a lot of American roots music. … I guess I feel like it stands up after all these years.”
Of course, Osborne is writing new music, too – including collaborations with Americana singer-songwriter Anders Osborne – as well as gardening outside her home in New York’s Hudson Valley.
“I’m transferring some of my little seedlings into some bigger pots and I’m going to try to grow some vegetables this year,” she said.
“I grew up in Kentucky and was running around in nature all the time. So I like just being outside and working in the dirt with my hands. There’s something about that that just really calms me down.”
VIDEO: Joan Osborne, “Tangled Up in Blue” (Paste Studios)
VIDEO: Joan Osborne, “Dylanology”
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