Joan Osborne: Dylanology Live
In 2017, Joan Osborne released the straightforwardly titled Songs of Bob Dylan, a baker’s dozen of tunes by one of the most covered composers in music history. Osborne managed to make those tracks her own, not the easiest thing to do with material that’s been interpreted countless different ways. Now, on the sequel, she presents six of those same songs and two (“Ballad of Hollis Brown” and “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”) that weren’t on the original, this time performed live. If it seems there may not be much new on offer here, then that’s true to some extent—perhaps she might have delved deeper into the catalog and expanded on the concept. But the on-stage versions do allow Osborne to look at these songs in a different way: For starters, she’s working with a solid, no-nonsense quintet simply composed of guitars, keys, bass and drums instead of the bevy of musicians she utilized in the studio—much the way Dylan himself approached the majority of these tunes—forcing Osborne to keep things leaner and simpler. And she does make excellent use of a trio of guests on Dylanology Live, who spice up the arrangements. Most notably, Jackie Greene’s organ on “Rainy Day Women #12 & #35” places that classic squarely into the blues-rock slot and, on the aforementioned “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” he remains in the fold, joined by Robert Randolph’s pedal steel, giving that track from Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ a funkiness that hadn’t quite been invented yet in 1964. Also dropping in is Amy Helm, who turns the Blood on the Tracks tune “Buckets of Rain” into a sweet duet that both retains the soulfulness of the original and takes it to a wholly new place.
