Joan Osborne is a crazy chick. At least, this seems to be the consensual view in the more retro and retarded areas of rock culture, as in the latest issue of Q magazine, where she's listed in that category alongside musicians such as Alanis Morissette and Sheryl Crow. When she released her debut single earlier this year, One Of Us, "kooky" was the word applied to its lyric lines, "What if God was one of us/Just a slob like one of us?" Crazy? Kooky? That sure seems to be the way rock'n'roll now seeks to define, deny, reduce and potentially limit the latest breed of female singer songwriters, as happened roughly three years ago when a similar label was slapped on that other magnificent triumvirate Tori Amos, PJ Harvey and Bjork. But it ain't gonna work, boys.
Crazy? I might be slowly approaching that state, but I wasn't when we recorded that song!" Joan responds, speaking on the phone from Nevada. "But that kind of stuff has probably been, historically, a way to marginalise somebody who has a view that may be a little bit threatening. Yet I don't let it bother me too much. I don't think most people think I'm crazy."
Or if they do, clearly Joan Osborne is not alone. The mere fact that One of Us has spent the last three months in the Irish Top 30 would suggest that there are many people in this country who are tuning into her God/slob question at some intrinsic level, as though it tapped right into the core of some religious zeitgeist. That definitely seems to be the case in America, where this 33 year old "lapsed Catholic" has discovered that women, in particular, seem to cheer deliriously when she sings that line in concert, from a song she describes as "relatively light hearted" but "asking some pretty fundamental questions about what you believe in terms of God and the universe and all that".
Equally, Osborne's glorious, Grammy nominated album, Relish, reflects her own current obsession with what she calls the "concept of falling from grace" and even more sinfully, perhaps, relishing that descent, as in the song Dracula Moon where she sings "I'm naked in a hotel room/making out with my one true love/You say, come back home/I say I'm just falling from grace/I said, I like falling from grace.
"It's not that I'm subscribing to falling from grace as necessarily a way to self discovery it just seems that in religious fundamentalist culture there is this picture of a spiritual person as being something of a child, a sheep following orders and that this is the only way to get into heaven," she elaborates. "I rejected that a limited perspective. I believe you can be a really spiritual person and still be in touch with your own intellect, sexuality and free will all the things that make you a human being." From: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/not-quite-saint-joan-1.58361
