She may seem the odd-woman out on a touring soul revue but Joan Osborne has paid her dues. Russell Baillie reports
Joan Osborne laughs down the line that she isn't too sure what she's doing as part of The Motown Event - the revue coming to the Hawkes Bay's Mission Estate in the New Year.
She is, after all, blonde and some 20 years younger than most of the headline acts.
But the New York singer-songwriter has a connection.
She sang Martha and the Vandellas' Heatwave and Jimmy Ruffin's What Becomes of the Broken Hearted in the 2002 documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown, a film about the Funk Brothers, the resident backing musicians the label employed in its heyday.
And there are likely to be requests for her own One of Us - her 1995 international hit which was the last time she troubed the pop charts. But after that major label excursion, she's not lacked for recording or touring opportunities.
Osborne has released seven studio albums since One of Us's parent album Relish, including a Nashville-recorded country record Pretty Little Stranger and How Sweet It Is, a set of rock and soul covers - some, like the title track, old Motown songs.
As well as the Funk Brothers, she has also sang and toured with another 60s musical institution, The Dead - former members of the Grateful Dead - and with the band's bassist Phil Lesh's own outfit. Which might seem quite a musical distance from the soul-pop of Motown but Osborne says even the Grateful Dead used to cover Motown numbers.
"For me it was great as a writer myself to steep myself in the song catalogues.
"Motown was an assembly line, and it was very much modelled on the Detroit Ford plant assembly line, so they tried to craft these things that were like beautiful pleasure-giving pop machines that would stand up to listen after listen and affect this huge amount of people, which it did.
"But the Grateful Dead thing is a much more amoebic kind of thing. The form is much freer and they rely much more on improvisation from night to night. Whereas if you saw the Temptations in their heyday they would have hit that choreography in the same way every night."
Yes, as a free-range independent artist, Osborne sees some irony in joining a celebration of a label which groomed its artists and treated music as a production line.
"In that moment of time it was an incredibly effective strategy because what Motown did was break down the colour barrier in the United States and I think it needed to have that polish and seamless appeal in the early years - of course it became more and more political as society changed and as the 60s went on.
"In the beginning they offered up these shiny pop creations which were designed to bring joy to the largest amount of people and in so doing did break some of the colour barrier."
So what other Motown songs would she like to do in the show?
"I am not sure. Do you have any requests?"
Well maybe something involving a Diana Ross wig?
"The wig maybe not. But the dresses definitely."
LOWDOWN
Who: Joan Osborne, singer-singer and the voice behind 1995 hit One of Us
What: The Motown Event, Mission Estate, February 13
