Osborne Talks Covers, Dylan
September 21 -- "I feel like the cover songs sort of choose me," admits Joan Osborne, who's been known to wrap her versatile pipes around other folks' tunes. She does so again on Righteous Love, her long-awaited follow-up to 1995's multiplatinum "Relish." Besides a collection of striking originals, the album sports two covers: Bob Dylan's "To Give You My Love" and Gary Wright's 1976 No. 2 hit, "My Love Is Alive."
Osbone calls the latter track an "accident" that grew out of jam she and the musicians on Righteous Love staged one night in Los Angeles. "They had sort of a side band they do called Jack S--t," Osborne recalls. "They were getting ready to do a gig in Hollywood and asked me if I wanted to come and sing a couple of songs with them. So we were sitting around trying to figure out a song to do, and it was like, 'Do you remember this one?' And I started singing it off the top of my head.
"Mitchell [Froom, the album's producer] got this look on his face like, 'Hmm, something interesting is happening here,'" she continues. "So he said, 'Guys, maybe we should try to record that.' It was almost a joke at first, but it sounded cool."
Osborne had a greater affinity for the Dylan song, albeit based on his versions rather than those recorded by Billy Joel and Garth Brooks. "I managed to get my hands on an advance copy of it before it came out," Osborne says. "I was driving down I-95 listening to it, and when that song came on I had to pull off the road and started crying. Something about that song got me by the throat and wouldn't let me go. You ignore that thing at your own peril."
Osborne also got a chance to sing with Dylan when they recorded "Chimes of Freedom" for the soundtrack of the TV miniseries The '60s — an encounter she lists as one of the greatest fruits of Relish's success.
"It was incredibly flattering to be asked to do it," she says. "The fact that Bob Dylan even knows who I am blows my mind. We did it on Halloween night, in the same studio, actually on the same microphone — my face was two inches away from Bob Dylan's face.
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