“Last night, I was tearing up like crazy and had to turn around from the crowd,” Anders Obsorne says one Sunday morning this past September. “It happens quite frequently. Things start to surface – when you are actually going through stuff onstage – that’s what makes it special. That’s what it is all about. Anything else becomes two-dimensional – its television. It’s not real.”

Osborne is sitting in an Asbury Park, N.J. boardwalk breakfast joint, ripping into a stack of bacon and a pork roll, sipping a triple espresso and moving the eggs around his plate like a brush on canvas. This barely awake version of him is a far cry from the man leading the ferocious three-hour gig the night before at The Saint that bordered on a rock and roll exorcism.

“The stage is a pretty good arena for working out stuff,” he continues as his blue eyes gradually brighten and the caffeine kicks in. “The chip on my shoulder that I got? It comes out onstage. I get pissed off up there. Sadness that I got – it comes out. My eyes get filled with tears sometimes – not when singing, just us playing together – because what we are doing musically creates this very strong emotion.”

Onstage, he is in constant motion. His tie dyed shirt is a blur as he headbangs and strangles his guitar. He sings with his neck stretched out to reveal all of its tendons, his eyes closed or rolling back in his head, performing until his emotions and physicality become one.

“I’ve toured nonstop for two and a half years,” says Obsorne, who sports a rather burly mountain man beard and tattoos galore. “Now, it’s not just songwriting, it is ‘live’ writing. We are developing that sense of playing it live and keeping it interesting for ourselves and the audience,” he says of his onstage collaboration with bandmates bassist Carl Dufrene and drummer Eric Bolivar.
“I enjoy the search and trying to develop these special moments,” Osborne says of the gigs. “Take a song that we started and make sure that I don’t rehash it every time. It’s important that I let the moment breathe and let the song do something; [that I] enjoy the freedom of trying things and going for things that end up in good places.”

For many years, Osborne was far from being in a “good place.” If life influences art and songwriting, then Osborne’s gritty, electrified blues have a dozen box sets worth of material to pull from. In the not so distant past, his days read like a Charles Bukowski novel with a forward by William S. Burroughs and footnotes by Hunter S. Thompson. For good measure (or misery), throw in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina into Osborne’s hellish biography – a well-known and public battle with drugs and alcohol, family members dying – and it reads like one of the dark episodes of Treme. However, Osborne’s story is not one that ends with an epitaph written too soon, rather it’s one of redemption that sees the artist rebuilding his life and his city.

“It takes a while to see what the effect is after a thing like that because you can’t really tell right away,” he says of Katrina and the socio-economic wreckage that it caused in New Orleans. “Most of it is a long process – the divorces, psychiatric institutions, financial disasters, people committing suicide and relapsing. It took it a while to get to the bottom and then you’ve got to start again – because you have to.”

Starting in 2008, Osborne started over, too. He went to rehab and has managed to stay clean; he rebuilt the kitchen in his New Orleans home with his own hands using reclaimed wood; he painted regularly on his back porch; he took his kids to school every day; and, most important, he opened the doors to his writing room again.

Reminded by his past successes – notably the platinum record that hangs on the wall commemorating the triple platinum success of “Watch the Wind Blow By,” which he wrote and Tim McGraw made famous – and with the help of New Orleans-based friends drummer Stanton Moore, organist Robert Walter and singer Pepper Keenan, he created American Patchwork, a standard bearing record in American Blues.

With American Patchwork, his eighth studio album, Osborne has embraced a dirty rock side as well as a tender side that recalls Neil Young (another artist who overcame epic drug addictions and a devil-may-care attitude). Indeed, the previous night at The Saint, Osborne closed with a 16 minute version of Young’s “Cortez the Killer.” Osborne’s choice of cover song and performance style is neither a replication of nor a tribute to Young, but rather a marker on his career and life trajectory.

“Since I got clean, there are so many things coming to the forefront,” he says earnestly. “Like my early musical influences like Neil Young. When I was 13, the first concert I ever saw was Neil Young. Those things are naturally coming into focus right now and some reason they were not, for decades. That has changed how I look at music, how I want it to feel – it’s that search for that initial spark of what music did to me.”