Joan Osborne was one of the biggest pop stars in the world in 1995, with a hit single, “One of Us,” and a multi-platinum album, “Relish.” Lilith Fair was in full force and lazy music journalists decided it was the year of “women in rock,” a fabrication that at least helped a home-girl put away a nest-egg.
Osborne grew up in Anchorage, Ky., a mini-city on the outskirts of Louisville, and performs Wednesday at The Kentucky Center’s Bomhard Theater for a Dare to Care Food Bank benefit (8 p.m., $30, $25 with a non-perishable food item). She has a strong new album, “Little Wild One,” that reunites her with songwriters/producers Eric Bazilian, Rob Hyman and Rick Chertoff, her partners on “Relish.”
Osborne kindly gave us a call last week.
There isn’t a lot of information floating around out there about your music experiences in Louisville. Is that because you didn’t have many?
I think I was in a band, you know, in high school for about five days, and then the bass player decided he didn’t like me and I was kicked out of the band. I was the drummer’s girlfriend and they hired me as the back-up singer and then, you know, the bass player decided he didn’t like me and I was out.
So that was my entire music career in Louisville. It was a rock band. I think they wanted me to sing Heart covers and Stevie Nicks songs.
Yeah, lucky for me.
Did you have a strong idea going in about how you wanted this record to sound?
Not at the beginning. It really just sort of came out of myself and Eric Bazilian deciding that we wanted to get together and do a little songwriting. And then sort of slowly the old team that made the ‘Relish’ album kind of joined in bit by bit and it seemed like we were getting the whole gang back together again..….As then as we worked on it and it sort of unfolded, it became more and more clear to me about the kind of sense of place that I wanted to give it, to just give it the notion of taking place in New York.
To me, it’s such a great life, you know? Even when I was first starting out and playing these tiny little clubs, and maybe there were 10 people in the audience, it just felt so real to me and it felt so powerful to me to be able to do this.
And yeah, of course, there are great things about selling millions of records and there are a lot of benefits that come with that. And there’s a lot of responsibilities that I found to be really distracting and not really much to the point. If you have a huge success you find that you end up sort of servicing your own celebrity and your own fame when you’d probably rather be writing a song.
I can’t say that, you know, having a huge success and then not having the next record sell anywhere near as many copies didn’t matter at all to me. Of course, we all want to have a big success, and that’s really nice, but I also could tell that it seemed like there were enough people listening and enough people interested that I could maintain a career for a longer time than maybe some other people have been able to, and that’s the real challenge in this day and age. I kind of feel sorry for people who are just coming up now. How do you maintain something? How do you get enough notoriety that you can continue to do this for years and years if that’s what you want to do. It seems like that’s probably a tougher thing to do for younger artists right now.
You haven’t played Louisville very often, maybe a couple of times.
No, not too much, and I’m not sure why. It’s not like there aren’t any music lovers in town. I guess I’ll have to remedy that in the future
