Experiencing a Joan Osborne concert

Experiencing the Joan Osborne Concert

May 16, 2014 at the Kessler Theater in Dallas

Written by Dan McDonald

 

                Sometimes my brain malfunctions.  Friday May 16, 2014 was one of those days.  Friday was going to be a busy day.  I had been in St. Louis attending a training seminar that was related to my work.  I was scheduled to fly back to my home town that morning and then I had plans to go to the Joan Osborne concert that evening in Dallas, for which I caught a flight from my home city to Dallas in the afternoon.  I had a bag in St. Louis with a few things including a camera.  I was waiting for a Metro train to take me to the airport, so I pulled my airplane ticket for my flight home, and then the train pulled into the stop and lo, I had my ticket with me and left my bag at the Metro Stop.  (No worry!  I checked with Metro and they have it in their lost and found!)  Then I got to Dallas and decided I didn’t need a cell phone at the concert.  So instead of having nice photographs to show on my blog for attending the Joan Osborne concert I have memories to describe and an image pulled down from the internet.

 

Joan Osborne, a reasonably recent photograph

            I want to say this about Joan Osborne; she is too good of a performer to be as forgotten by most people as she has become.  When I told people I was going to a “Joan Osborne” concert they usually asked “Who is that?”  I will tell you what I love about Joan Osborne as a performer.  She is a performer who loves and respects music in all its genres and can sing virtually anything.  How many people have shared the stage with Emmylou Harris, Roseanne Cash, Bob Dylan, Luciano Pavoratti, Sandy Patty, and toured as the lead chick singer with the Grateful Dead?  She has seven nominations for Grammies.  But hardly anyone knows her, and if they know her she is known for one song from the nineties.  She looked younger back then, but I think most of us looked younger twenty years ago, but this was her hit back then which people hear and say, “O that is who Joan Osborne is”?  It’s the hit that made her famous for a while, but even if not so many people know who she is now, she has remained a wonderful performer whose music is a study of life that reveals not only a singer with a good voice, but a performer with respect and love for the message and emotion of a song.

            Those of us who grew up in the sixties may have loved Motown.  Anyone growing up and hearing an original can seldom appreciate someone else's covering of an original piece that has memories and life contexts that no later singer can provide when covering the song we loved in its original form.  Joan Osborne has the ability to look over a song; and then interpret its message and emotion, so as to breathe fresh life into the performance.  She honors the original not by imitating how the original sang the song, but by contemplating the song and its message and performing it in such a way as to project how the song moved her as she contemplated it.  This performance of the 60’s hit “What becomes of the Brokenhearted” led me to decide that the next opportunity I had to see Joan Osborne in concert I would do so.  Whether she is singing one of her own pieces or covering a piece done by a performer earlier she will perform the song with a beautiful and powerful sense of message, music, energy and emotion.

            She has released a few CD’s some of which have received acclaim from the music industry, but which did not sell nearly as well as her “Relish” CD which was the CD where “One of Us” made its debut.  CD’s like “Little Wild Ones” and her latest “Love and Hate” are built around themes.  “Little Wild Ones” in many ways was a tribute to New York City where she has lived for many years.  It spans life in New York City from remembering a time past where a child grew up riding the rides on Coney Island to a song asking “Bury me on the Battery”.

            I have to admit that she didn’t do some of these favorites of mine at her concert, but every song she did was wonderful.  Her latest CD brings together songs covering the range of songs regarding romance from attraction to mature love to breakup and hate.  This again is something I love that she does.  She presents in a concert the story of life in its multi-faceted faces and experiences.  She sang one song explaining how it echoes a Gershwin classic.  To be honest, it is my favorite sounding song on the CD, but I expect the more I listen to this latest CD she has done, the more I will fall in love with the richness of the other songs.  I imagine there will be times that I decide one song is the best and other times when I think another song is the best.  But for now I am sort of partial to “Work on me”.

            It was a wonderful experience to see Joan perform at the Kessler Theater in Dallas.  I had never been to the Kessler and imagined a fairly large venue, but it was sold out with maybe 200 and surely less than 300 persons in attendance.  It was a cozy setting where you felt part of something spanning the experience of casual to wonderfully special.  I would suspect that for those who have followed her and have come to love her work as a singer, performer, songwriter, music interpreter, and bard singing the songs of life, we felt as if given a wonderful precious gift.  We were entertained by someone who has absorbed music into her soul as one who loves the music.  She has added to that love of music a respect for the music, her fellow performers, and her audience.  It is this sort of attitude that permeates her music and translates into a beautiful and masterful performance.

            Let me conclude by saying something about myself.  I tend to allow myself to become isolated in life.  Sometime last year I decided that this year I would force myself to get out more; to do and see things.  It has been a long time since I had gone to a concert.  I went to Joan Osborne’s concert because I was convinced that she loved music and that her love and respect for the music was what made her a special performer.  She sings songs as if to pay them honor with her performance.  I didn’t get any pictures of the concert, but I do have memories that I will seek to hang on to for probably as long as I live.  As one lady on Twitter reminded me, memories of our experiences are actually worth more than photographs.  Joan Osborne and all those who performed along with her have given me memories I will forever count as precious.  I could not be happier that the first concert I went to in many years was a concert by Joan Osborne at the Kessler Theater in Dallas, Texas.  It was one of my privileges in life.