Dan's Papers - June 26, 2009 - Who's Here: Joan Osborne, Singer/Songwriter

Growing up just outside of Louisville, Kentucky, Joan Osborne never dreamed that she would one day make a living as a singer, let alone a Grammy-winning one. She's best known for "One of Us," her award-winning pop-rock hit of 1995 from the album Relish, but the majority of her material is steeped in blues and country.

Like most teenagers, Osborne grew up listening to music, particularly bands like The Rolling Stones, while her musical theater fan parents would constantly bring home cast albums of shows. Although she was involved in musical activities in high school, becoming a musician was never her life's ambition. "It's not something I dared to dream about," she said. "I never dreamed of being a professional singer. When you grow up in a little town in Kentucky, these kinds of things are pipe dreams."

So Osborne headed to New York City to study documentary filmmaking at New York University. Putting herself through school, she held several jobs while taking classes. But one semester she ran out of money, and worked feverishly to save up so she could return to NYU. One night, a friend invited her to a blues bar down the block from her apartment. The band was finished performing, but the piano player had stuck around and was noodling on the piano, playing more for himself than the bar's patrons.

Osborne's friend dared her to go on stage and sing with the pianist. If she did, he said, he'd buy all her drinks for the night - an enticing offer for a broke student. She sang a Billie Holiday song and the piano player told her she should come back to the weekly open mic night at the bar.

That's when Osborne's musical education truly began. Though she had a late start, she was a quick learner. Almost overnight she became a part of the local blues scene, discovering music she had never listened to much along the way - Howlin' Wolf, Etta James, Otis Redding. "I spent the money I was saving to go back to school on records," she said. "The kind of stuff I listened to in high school. If I had followed their influences, going back to the sources, I would have found more interesting music." Eventually, after hitting open mics on a regular basis for a year or so, she formed her first band. "Ultimately, I realized I wasn't going back to school," she said.

Osborne will be performing at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett on July 4, and, she says, she knows the venue intimately, having performed there regularly since she just started out. "It was smaller back then, we played there before it was renovated and expanded," she said. "And we'd sleep on the little couches upstairs because we were too broke to get a hotel room."

She's come a long way since those fledgling days of her career, having released her seventh studio album, Little Wild One, last September. For this record, Osborne teamed up with producers/writers Rob Hyman, Eric Bazilian and Rick Chertoff, for the first time since the foursome wrote and recorded Relish, which, in addition to "One of Us," also released "Right Hand Man" and "St. Therese" as singles. "It was kind of like getting the old gang back together," Osborne said of the collaboration for Little Wild One, which, she added, came about accidentally - seemingly a pattern in her career.

Initially she got together with Bazilian to write a few songs, when Hyman happened to stop by. "Then after a couple of days of working as a trio, I thought, 'Hmm, this feels oddly familiar.' So we called Rich. It was such a good experience working together again. It was very interesting. I think we are all better writers now and more interesting artists."

Osborne says that as a songwriter she is "much freer and much less afraid to make mistakes." And getting the team behind Relish together again was good for her creatively. "I like working with collaborators who throw me off balance and push me into an area I'm not comfortable with," she said. "It's productive creatively."

The result is a more pop-oriented album akin to Relish - though, Osborne stresses, nothing like the type of pop music you'd expect to hear on, say, a Maria Carey or Beyonce album. This comes after releasing more genre-oriented CDs, including a country album recorded in Nashville, a soul flavored album and a record of cover songs. The first single off Little Wild One is "Sweeter Than the Rest."

At her upcoming performance, Osborne will pull heavily from her newest album, but you can expect to hear a song or two from each of her records, with a few interesting covers thrown in for good measure. Admittedly more comfortable performing than writing and recording in the studio, Osborne looks forward to making the trip out the Hamptons, and getting on stage, where she thrives.

"One of the great pleasures of doing this is that a song doesn't really develop until you take it out live and perform for an audience," she said. "The songs get to stretch out and take on a new form. It's about feeding off the crowd and other musicians."

Joan Osborne at the Stephen Talkhouse, July 4, 8 p.m. Tickets: $100 and $115. For more information: stephentalkhouse.com or joanosborne.com.