Interview: Joan Osborne

The recent movie “A Complete Unknown” may have stoked a mini-revival in all things Robert Zimmerman, but Joan Osborne has been paying homage to the man better known as Bob Dylan dating back a few decades. That admiration is reflected in her current album, “Dylanology Live,” which features eight Dylan covers performed live at a show and also features guest appearances by Amy Helm, Jackie Greene and Robert Randolph.

“We put out a “Songs of Bob Dylan” cover record studio album in 2017 and following that, I decided to do something really fun,” Osborne explained in a recent interview. “I invited some special guest artists to come out and do a full-band show. It was great and turned out to be a nice tour. I was recently looking through some archives and found we had this recording of one of the shows at Tarrytown Music Hall. Normally, I’m the harshest critic of listening back to my live stuff. This time, I was pleasantly surprised that this nice discovery from the archives all sounded pretty good.”

She added, “It wasn’t a long tour -- we only did a handful of dates, but that was the whole show. I’m just glad that someone, I don’t even remember if it was me or not, had the presence of mind to record it.”

For this current tour, the Kentucky native is shaking it up a bit in terms of who will join her for this string of dates.

“Some of these shows are going to be trio gigs and some of them are going to be full-band gigs with special guests,” she said. “And it’s not the same ones that are on the album. For some of the shows it’s going to be Nicki Bluhm, Anders Osborne. We’ve got Cindy Cashdollar playing pedal steel and Gail Ann Dorsey playing bass and singing. It’s really going to be an incredible show. I say it’s going to be like the Rolling Thunder Revue with more women and fewer drugs.”

While Dylan has always been on Osborne’s radar, it wasn’t until the late ‘80s when the man from Hibbing, MN, started to get under her skin.

“It wasn’t until I started doing music seriously in my early 20s that I became more aware of him and started to hear other people covering his songs,” she said. “Seeing him in “The Last Waltz” and hearing everyone cover ‘I Shall Be Released’ really had an impact. And then pulling on that thread and being part of the downtown music scene, I remember doing ‘I Shall Be Released’ on the night the Berlin Wall came down. Everyone was in this incredibly celebratory mood and we did that song. It wasn’t written for that event, but it completely captured that moment in a very beautiful and poetic way. It was this really amazing moment on stage to sing that song.”

Shortly after that, Osborne’s musical journey took her to France, where she became entranced by Dylan’s 1989 outing, “Oh Mercy.”

“The first Dylan album that really got under my skin was ‘Oh Mercy,’” she recalled. “I bought that when I was in Europe when I left New York for a little bit. I went to Paris and was playing with this street band and busking in the street. I walked past this record store in Paris and saw this new Bob Dylan record had come out. I bought it on cassette at that point because all I had with me was my little cassette player. It just knocked me out and is still one of my favorite records of his. I think it’s an album that’s under the radar for a lot of people. I think there are such beautiful, beautiful songs on it. I was even inspired to cover ‘The Man in the Long Black Coat’ on the ‘Relish’ album.”

Having seen “A Complete Unknown,” Osborne admired the performances by Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro. She thought Elle Fanning had a thankless job given how the late Suze Rotolo was portrayed (“She was really involved in the Greenwich Village scene and was then turned into this mopey girl that gets left behind at the end of the movie. I think that was inaccurate and doesn’t do her justice.”) But for the Brooklyn-based chanteuse, shining a light on Dylan’s importance was the most impactful after effect of the film.

“It was a great way to extend Dylan’s legacy to a younger generation,” she said. “For young folks who don’t already know about him or maybe only know his name, this was a great way to do it in a way that he couldn’t necessarily do on his own by continuing to tour forever and ever.”

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