Joan Osborne Shares Her Favorite Bob Dylan Albums

When it comes to Bob Dylan, Joan Osborne’s interest/fandom runs long before A Complete Unknown racked up eight Oscar nominations earlier this year. Not only did Osborne release the Zim tribute album The Songs of Bob Dylan back in 2017, but she most recently put out Dylanology Live, which features special guests Amy Helm, Jackie Greene and Robert Randolph drawn from a show she played up in Westchester’s Tarrytown Music Hall. For the Kentucky native, Dylan’s influence on what’s nowadays being called Americana music is inescapable and one that’s drawn Osborne like a moth to Dylan’s creative flame.

“After he came, he shifted the entire paradigm of roots and popular music,” Osborne explained. “It used to be that there was this division of labor between people who wrote songs and people who performed songs. His coming out and performing his own songs and being such a singular voice really shattered that model. If you were going to be a real artist, you had to write your own songs. I’m fortunate enough that I can sing other people’s songs and I do that all the time, But, in order to really feel like I can be taken seriously as an artist and I can take myself seriously as an artist, I also had to learn how to write songs.”

For this current tour, the Kentucky native is shaking it up a bit in terms of who is going out on the road 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.”

When asked to name her favorite Dylan albums, Osborne was more than happy to oblige.

Oh Mercy (1989)

“I think it was the first Bob Dylan record that didn’t have a lot of hits on it that I spent a lot of time with. I love the writing. I believe that song ‘Shooting Star’ is on Oh Mercy. What a beautiful, perfect, simple, gorgeous, heartbreaking song about reaching into the past and thinking about someone from your past. It crystallized that and I knew who that was for me. It was really, really beautiful. And ‘Everything is Broken’ is on that record. There are so many great tunes. It’s a wonderful record. I think because it wasn’t full of songs that I had already heard before and was fresh and new, I could internalize it in a way that made it more meaningful to me.”

Blood On the Tracks (1975)

“That one I came to a bit later. I of course knew a lot of the songs on it, but it came to me more in the process of working on this Songs of Bob Dylan record. This would have been about 2016 when I was really digging into his material and trying to decide what to do for this covers album. I think a lot of people will say that it’s one of his most powerful records and I think that it came, for him, out of this very turbulent time of his breakup with his wife and things like that. There is this raw, emotional intensity of it and combine that with him being at the height of his poetic powers—it’s a stunning, stunning piece of work.”

Love and Theft (2001)

“I think his writing has just become such an interesting version of him on that record. He’s got this crack band that is just killing it on very song and reaching back, again, into these older styles of music like blues and what was called race music and things like that. Things that were popular in the 1920’s and 1930’s and taking those and putting his own particular spin on it. I think it’s such a playful record. He really seems to be having fun. I think it’s such a cool record. I think this later Dylan 3.0 or whatever you want to call it—if that’s all he ever was and ever did, I would love it. He’d still be an important artist.”

Joan Osborne will be appearing on August 7 at Stephen Talkhouse, 61 Main St., Amagansett. For more information, visit stephentalkhouse.com or call 631-267-3117.