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Joan Osborne - How Sweet It Is

That’s a totally hopeless task,” says Joan Osborne, talking about the fantasy of trying to re-tweak pop music classics so that they might eclipse the power and stature of the originals.  “There’s just no way you can do that.”
It’s something Osborne has wrestled with since she appeared in ‘Standing in the Shadows of Motown,’ a documentary about the work of the record company’s legendary Detroit-based rhythm section The Funk Brothers, and subsequently began to prepare her new album, HOW SWEET IT IS, released jointly through Womanly Hips, Osborne’s independent label.

On this collection, Osborne revisits, in ways both comforting and startling, mid-‘60s soul standards.
For soul classics popularized by creative titans like Otis Redding (“These Arms of Mine”), Aretha Franklin (“Think), Jimi Hendrix (“Axis: Bold as Love”), The Spinners (“I’ll Be Around”) and others, Osborne and producer Levanthal fuse the literate intimacy of singer-songwriter rock and the dramatic vocal freedom of interpretive pop singing with the rhythmic life and harmonic luxe of soul.

With vocals that establish her further as one of the most sensitive and mighty interpretive singers at work today, Osborne steered HOW SWEET IT IS in a different, more classic, direction. On 2000’s ‘Righteous Love’, the follow-up to ‘Relish’, her multi-platinum 1995 major-label breakthrough recording that spawned her “One Of Us” hit sensation, Osborne had sung with a bit of an agenda. On HOW SWEET IT IS, that has vanished, replaced by a concentration so jealously focused on the needs and message of a particular song that Osborne’s focus melts into pure soul elegance and communication.