Joan Osborne is one of hundreds of artists who have sung the music of Bob Dylan. In her case, she included a version of his then-recent “Man in the Long Black Coat” on her Grammy-nominated debut album Relish 30 years ago. Dylan noticed and invited her to duet with him on a remake of “Chimes of Freedom” for a TV miniseries. They’d share the stage for a series of shows with the Grateful Dead, and he’d remain a touchstone for her recordings ever since.
In 2017, she recorded a full album of Songs of Bob Dylan and toured to promote it, bringing a cast of guest stars with her. One night’s recording, which featured Robert Randolph, Jackie Greene, and Levon Helm’s daughter Amy Helm, was released in April as Dylanology (Live). So Osborne is on tour to promote that—again with a stellar band, but not the same one on the record (and for that matter, repeating only three songs from the live album).
Closing out the latest Joan Osborne Sings the Songs of Bob Dylan tour at the tasteful Hamilton in DC, Tuesday, she was flanked by a formidable female front line. On one side was Cindy Cashdollar the slide and dobro master who’s played with everyone in Austin, where she lived for 23 years, to Woodstock, NY, where she now presides. She added just the right coloring to tunes, and a bit of authenticity—she played on the original Dylan recording on “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” on Time Out of Mind, as well as the live version here.
On the other side of Osborne was Gail Lynn Dorsey, the distinctive bassist who has played with everyone from Tears for Fears and The B-52’s to David Bowie for nine years; her last appearance in DC was singing “Life on Mars” at a David Bowie tribute performance of his Blackstar album a year ago at the Kennedy Center. Besides providing a solid and palpable bottom to the night’s Dylan repertoire, Dorsey also showed some strong, soulful vocals by taking the lead on “Lady Lay Lay” and dueting with keyboardist Will Bryant on “Shelter from the Storm.”
While she sang lead on most of the two-set, 21-song show, Osborne also played gracious host, stepping into the shadows several times to allow most of the other members of her band to take lead vocals at least once. Drummer Lee Falco held it down vocally, both when he took the lead for a solid “When I Paint My Masterpiece” that sounded the way it did when Dylan kicked off his Rolling Thunder Revue shows half a century ago, and when he unexpectedly took an acoustic guitar and sang a solo “Song to Woody.” It might have been considered an obscurity a year ago, but now it was warmly received because of the film A Complete Unknown, suggesting that Timothy Chalamet may have created a whole new generation of Dylan fans.
The “special guest” of the show, introduced halfway into the first set was Swedish-born Americana artist Anders Osborne (no relation to the headliner), who brought the first electric guitar on stage to stomp through a thoroughly enjoyable “The Man in Me.” As he stayed on stage, though, he kept increasing the volume such that “Maggie’s Farm” got plowed, and any former lightness of “Isis” and “Mozambique” in the second set was obliterated.
Osborne’s reaction to his hard-charging approach was to quickly mellow things out—in the first set with a lovely “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” and in the second with “Every Grain of Sand.” Her voice, warm with a bit of whiskey grit, gave added melody and lift to most of the well-chosen songs, however she chose to present them.
And there were some surprising variations, from the speedy Bo Diddley beat given to the opening “She Belongs to Me” to a jazzy approach to “Rainy Day Women #12 and #35.” But as she explained, the author allows such liberties. “When Bob Dylan does his own songs, he takes liberties with them, too,” Osborne said after a “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat” seemingly gone to “Route 66” that opened the second set. “Sometimes he’s halfway through a song and you still don’t know which one it is.”
It was an unusual tour for Osborne—the rare one where she didn’t sing her Grammy-nominated hit “One of Us.” But it was also timely, such that things like “Everything is Broken” seem written for precisely this moment (and two blocks from the White House).
The Dylan songbook is so broad and rich, there’s only one crossover song from Dylan’s own summer touring setlist and Joan’s (“Simple Twist of Fate”). Which means there are plenty of nuggets to support a third Joan Osborne Sings the Songs of Bob Dylan tour sometime in the future.
