Joan Osborne returned to the Jewish Community Center in Rochester for a show at the intimate Hart Theater on Friday, April 18. She was touring in advance of her upcoming Dylanology Live album which releases April 25. The album features cuts from her 2017 tour supporting her Songs of Bob Dylan album. This show would similarly highlight Osborne’s interpretations of Bob Dylan’s catalog. The tour supporting the live album from the tour that supported the album. Highway 61 Revisited, indeed.
The Bob Dylan songbook is a road well traveled. Everyone has their own rendition of at least one Dylan tune in their pocket, and very rarely does it mimic the original. But how about an entire album, soon two albums, and a complete concert? How would that work? For Osborne… incredibly well. She had a sell out crowd completely rapt from minute 1 to minute 90.
“Oh, so this is a listening crowd?” she quipped after a hushed crowd barely breathed during her band’s psychedelic blues rendition of “Highway 61 Revisited”. No phones were recording, no side conversations were happening; the theater sat quietly in awe.
Jack Petruzzelli manned the guitar while Will Bryant fleshed out the sound on keys and baby grand piano. Osborne added some rhythms on a lone snare, a tambourine, and with snaps and toe taps, adding additional guitar occasionally.
The trio made the material their own. Even Dylan reinvents himself live. “He’s halfway through a song before you even know what he’s playing,” as Osborne tells it. “It’s a sign of a good songwriter if the songs can be reinterpreted,” she continued. With Dylan, that’s an understatement of course.
And interpret they did. “Rainy Day Women” took on a bluesy edge with a hint of 90’s alt-rock. “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” went “way out” jumping and jiving in full rockabilly regalia, much to the delight of the audience.
They didn’t concentrate on a certain Dylan era, covering ground from the early days, like set opener “She Belongs to You,” all the way up to “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” off of 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. However Osborne professed her love for his 80’s output. And this love came through in the setlist, which featured three selections off of 1989’s Oh Mercy: “Everything is Broken” with it’s punched up baseball-organ groove, “Man in the Long Black Coat” which they rearranged even from their own previous version, and “Shooting Star” in which Dylan’s unique cadence came shining through more than anywhere else.
They kept things fresh, adding in new material not from either album or having been performed previously. Though the best moments came from the most well-worn material. “High Water (For Charley Patton)” which appears on both the studio and live recordings, exhibited incredible interplay melding guitar, keys and vocals. Then closing out a three-song encore of Osborne originals, the band returned to full power in a performance of “Lifeline,” a nifty display of three-part interplay that sent the crowd home with satisfied smiles.
Setlist: She Belongs to Me, Everything is Broken, Man in the Long Black Coat, Highway 61 Revisited, Shooting Star, Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You, High Water (For Charley Patton), Trying to Get to Heaven, Rainy Day Women #12 & #35, Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat, I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You, Tangled Up in Blue
Encore: St. Theresa, One of Us, Lifeline
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