Joan Osborne’s Brooklyn Muse: A Challenge Well Met

2011 was a busy year for Joan Osborne, beginning with Love and Hate, the multimedia music/dance/film production she created and performed as part of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook Series in February, followed by a whirlwind tour that took her from Central Park to Seattle, ­all the while working on multiple recording projects and caring for her young daughter in their Boerum Hill home. So Brooklyn Roads was lucky to catch her between breaths this summer as she was preparing for an August residency at City Winery and a September tour with Dar Williams. She graciously shared with us some of her thoughts on her music, the music business and the Brooklyn experience.

One of the first things Joan told us was that yes, she was born in Kentucky, but no, “I didn’t grow up hearing fiddle at my dad’s knee.” In fact, her father was a classical music buff while her mother favored Broadway show tunes, and it wasn’t until she fell ill at age 9 that she had her musical coming of age.

“My mom put a radio in my room to keep me company. It was a time when you could hear a lot of different music on Top 40 radio…Charlie Rich, Rod Stewart, the Rolling Stones, Motown. I just loved the music and it made an impression on me.” Such eclectic influences help explain why she can sing and write convincingly and beautifully is so many musical genres, from her folky Platinum-selling single One of Us and her rocking debut CD Relish to the country-flavored Pretty Little Stranger and two albums of soul and Motown covers.

Other than a very brief stint in the high school band of her “boyfriend for a minute,” Joan told us that performing music “wasn’t part of my growing up…I didn’t really dream of doing it until I was in my 20s.” She came to New York to study filmmaking at NYU, but it wasn’t long before “I accidentally discovered this amazing music scene going on and started going to bars and clubs. I became a fan of the people like The Holmes Brothers–amazingly raw, soulful music. That’s when I got my [musical] education and immersed myself in it.”

The Brooklyn Effect

Joan lived alternately in Manhattan and Brooklyn, including South Slope and Prospect Heights, before settling down in Boerum Hill in 1998. She lauds New York as a great place to be an artist because, “you have a street life that goes on all around you that you can engage with, observe, or get inspiration from.” She adds, however, that “Brooklyn is where so much is happening now. [It’s a] vibrant community of artists [where] amazing music and art are being made.” She also has high praise for the borough’s “great cultural institutions,” including BAM, where she performed with the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 2007; the Brooklyn Museum, where she would like to perform as part of its Target First Saturdays series; and BRIC’s Celebrate Brooklyn! series, which she played twice “and would love to do it again. That band shell is great and the shows are always well curated.”

When we asked her how living in Brooklyn influences the creative process, she told us, “You do your own thing…lock yourself in your room and you write or you paint­,  but you also want to go out and see what other people are doing. You see something and say, ‘That’s amazing! What can I do to answer that?’ Brooklyn is constantly inspiring in that way; there’s so much going on around you, you feel challenged to do your best all the time.”

While Joan appreciates Manhattan, she prefers living one step away on this side of the East River, calling our borough “a more community oriented place. I know my neighbors, my daughter knows the neighbors…it’s a low-rise, mom-and-pop kind of existence that’s just hard to find in Manhattan any more. I’m sure there are pockets of it still, but it’s much more a way of life in Brooklyn. It’s the rule rather than the exception out here.” Her positive experiences living here ultimately manifested itself in her most recent album, Little Wild One, which is peppered with Brooklyn references.

Looking Ahead

Regarding the aforementioned recording projects, she revealed to us that “I’m in the mixing process with some blues, R&B and soul covers of Big Bill Broonzy, Mississippi John Hurt, Muddy Waters and a lot of really cool, interesting blues artists. I’m also writing some new songs with a side project group called Trigger Hippie with a couple of the guys who used to be in the Black Crowes, and with Jackie Green, a [San Francisco] Bay-area singer-songwriter who is an up-and-coming star on the Jazz band scene.” And sometime next year, “once the smoke clears on everything else I’m doing,” she will release the original songs she composed for Love and Hate as well.

Joan said she would also like to get a project going with Ben Harper and singles out Brooklyn’s own TV On The Radio among other artists with whom she would like to collaborate. “I don’t know if they have a slot for anything I would do…but I love what they do.”

A Woman in the “Business”

Joan, whose creative differences with the music establishment led her to create her own label, Womanly Hips, believes women performers “don’t get the automatic respect that a male musician might get,” despite the fact that a lot of myths, such as women not being able to sell as many tickets as men, “have bitten the dust over the years.” She acknowledges, however, that, “Everybody can be treated like cattle in the music business. You have to do your work and put your time in and earn it, no matter who you are. You can’t blame it all on sexism if things don’t go your way.”

She shared an anecdote with Brooklyn Roads that illustrates some of the issues unique to women performers: “When I was just getting started, I was playing at a club in Buffalo, which was right next door to a strip joint.” The man who owned both establishments, she said, “came over after we finished our sound check, pulled me aside and advised me to dress sexier, said maybe shorter skirts would really help me out. He really had a concept that people just wanted to see naked girls. You just have to laugh off things like that. The people who came to see the show that night, that was the real thing. They came to hear the music. That’s who I was interested in pleasing.”

Joan has been pleasing audiences even since, and we are pleased to report that Joan will be back performing in the New York area soon,  while she continues to put the finishing touches on her next recordings. After chatting with her and getting to know her, we can say with confidence to our fellow Brooklynites that Joan Osborne is indeed “one of us.”