Joan Osborne is officially a member of the sandwich generation. The 61-year-old singer-songwriter is not only empty nesting as her daughter enters her sophomore year at college, Osborne is also grappling with her 92-year-old mother exhibiting signs of Alzheimer’s disease. But as so often is the case when great art often comes out of the chaos of someone’s personal life, Osborne turned lemons into lemonade in the shape of last year’s Nobody Owns You, the Kentucky native’s 11th studio album and the follow-up to 2020’s Trouble and Strife.
(Photo by Laura Crosta)
For the Brooklyn resident, going into her sixth decade of living provided a time for reflection and proved to be the springboard for her latest project.
“I turned 60, so it was a time where a lot of things were going on and also a moment in my life to really take stock and just think about what am I here for?,” she explained. “And how much longer am I going to be here for and what am I going to do with that time that I have left on this Earth? All of these things that when we’re busy doing, doing, doing, we don’t necessarily think of that. But there are moments in your life where you really do stop and examine these kinds of questions. The songs all came out of all that personal reflection and struggling with these different personal things in my life.”
Recorded in winter 2023, the new album had Osborne heading into the studio with producer Ben Rice (Valerie June; Norah Jones) and working with a number of old and new friends guesting including Catherine Russell, Cindy Cashdollar, Rachel Yamagata, Jill Sobule and longtime musical collaborator Jack Petruzzelli. Working with Rice at his New York City-based recording studio Degraw Sound proved to be a balm for both artist and producer, the latter of whom was going through personal turmoil of his own.
“We were very excited to get to the studio every day,” Osborne said. “In fact, he was going through some personal stuff as well. He lost his father in the middle of our recording session, so we were both in this raw, emotional place and it was very helpful for us to come to the studio every day. It was sort of our respite and place where we knew that everything was going to be okay and also take everything we were going through and put it into the music instead of having it eat us alive.”
The end result was a dozen songs that find the Brooklyn resident getting introspective and plumbing into her current emotional state. Opening with “I Should Have Danced More,” Osborne looks back at missed opportunities amid an ethereal mix of ghostly guitar, Mellotron and floating background vocals while “Secret Wine” found her and Rice sharing a co-write on a delicate acoustic number that serves as a prayer for her mother’s future passage. Elsewhere, she rides a rumbling rhythm and a dash of Farfisa organ on “Woman’s Work” to punch home the realities of being a working mother. Her daughter also gets some musical advice on the title track which urges the listener to forge their own path and not be manipulated by anyone else’s expectations. And being the passionate progressive that she is, Osborne also used “Great American Cities” to strike back at the conservative narrative that somehow the country is descending into a lawless hellscape.
“I would be sitting in these airports and hear these TV pundits running down American cities and talking about how horrible and crime-ridden they are,” she said. “I would look at these talking heads and think to myself that they are sitting in their air-conditioned studio and then go to their chauffeur-driven Town car with the tinted windows and it’s going to take them to their gated community. They don’t ever go to these cities they’re talking about, so they don’t know what they’re saying. They’re just parroting some line that somebody who is trying to take advantage and consolidate their power told them to say and them don’t know what you’re saying. But I DO go to all these places.”
With the new album in place and a deep canon to draw from, Osborne is eager to hit the road and connect with her fans.
“At this point, I’ve got about 10 or 11 albums,” she said. “On the one hand, that’s great, but on the other hand I feel like I have to dip into each one of them a little bit. We do tend to concentrate on things from the Relish album, which is a fan favorite. Also from the blues record that I put out in 2012 (ed. Note: Bring It On Home)—that’s a big fan favorite. The Bob Dylan record [Ed. Note: 2017’s Songs of Bob Dylan ] is one that fans talk about all the time. And then we’re also going to do a bunch from the Nobody Owns You record, and probably dip into the Trouble & Strife record that came out before this one, which was the last one of all-original material. It’s going to be a lot of fun.”
(Photo source: Facebook)
Befitting this time of life when Osborne is taking stock of her life experience, she’s spending some of the remainder of the year working on a couple of creative, non-musical projects.
“I’ve been writing and working on a memoir,” Osborne said. “I’ve got a literary agent now, so that’s going to take up some time to work on that. It’s been very, very interesting. I’ve also been doing some painting. I had a show of my artwork in the city back in November [2023]. I just recently went to Mexico—it was so inspiring. Just the incredible colors and the visual quality of the light. It’s really sent me off into another whole round of painting. Hopefully I’ll have another show sometime this year and can bring out some of those paintings as well.”
Joan Osborne will be appearing on July 21 at Stephen Talkhouse, 61 Main St., Amagansett. For more information, visit www.stephentalkhouse.com or call 631-267-3117.
