Any fan of the bluesy end of Rock can have nothing but awe for the talents of Joan Osborne. Her first recording effort yielded no less than eight Grammy nominations - a testament to the power of her songwriting. Her passionate vocal performances exhibit a range of expression and texture for which it is hard to find comparison.

Her first two albums, Relish, and Righteous Love combine the sensuous ear candy of her voice with themes both mystical and mundane, but always surging into the archetypal and profound. The depth of content, and emotional intensity of her work has left her with a sizeable fan base hungering for similar headphone ammo. So it wasn't without a certain amount of courage that she dove into a different project for her new CD.

How Sweet It Is is Joan's re-imagining of Soul classics from the 60's and 70's. Anyone expecting to find her customarily powerful performances will find intensity of an altogether different sort.

Words like "sleek" and "smooth" do not do justice to the tone of these tracks. Pared down and toned down, there is plenty of room for the subtle, intricate vocal performance Joan delivers, making How Sweet It Is a uniquely pleasant listen.

I recently spoke spoke with Joan about her new CD and her career in general.

Tim Parker: There is very high regard and much anticipation for your original music. What led you to embark upon a compilation of Soul greats for your latest project?

Joan Osborne: I definitely am writing music and will be putting something out hopefully next year. But there was something about doing this Soul covers record that I thought was really relevant to what's happening in the world right now. It takes a while to digest the events of the last year enough to write songs about it, unless you're someone like Bruce Springsteen. I didn't feel like I could sit down and write a whole album's worth of material about the past year and everything that's happened with the events of 9-11. Yet I really wanted to do something that was topical and had some relevance. I wanted my music to be part of -in whatever small way- people's efforts to come to terms with it, or to deal with it. I thought this would be a really great way to do it in a timely fashion.

Many of these songs that were written thirty years ago are very relevant to what's happening right now. Some of them have political content. Some of them just have that amazing soulfulness and joyfulness of great Soul music, expressing to each other how much we mean to each other. I hear people all around me talking about that and searching for ways to do that, looking for ways to make sure the people who are important to them know they're important. So this was the kind of music I was drawn to do.

TVP: A social imperative is often a component to your music. Do you think that's something that just hasn't been done enough in the last, say 25 years?

JO: I don't know that it hasn't been done much. I think that the time period that I drew a lot of these songs from, the late 60's and early 70's, was a time period when music that had social consciousness was on the radio and were Top 40 hit songs. A song like "War" by Edmund Star, just a basic, flat-out anti-war song. It was a number one pop song. That kind of song hasn't received attention in recent years. If I wanted to guess why, I'd say it's less a matter of what the audience wants to hear, and more a matter of what the increasingly corporate music business has felt would be more profitable for them. Political music is being made, it's just harder for audiences to find it.

TVP: You have said that you listened to a lot of Hip Hop while you were getting ready to do the Soul project, and I was trying to figure out how they hooked in together. Is it the political aspect of Hip Hop that drew you to explore that medium?

JO: It was more of a technical consideration for me. I was interested in the minimal production and the minimal sound of a lot of the modern R & B and Hip Hop records and artists like Mary J. Blodge. A lot of her record is just a beat and a very simple track, and her voice. It works very well because when you have a singer of her gifts you really don't need much more than that. I was interested in that as a way to take these songs and put them in a more modern context so that they'd be different from their original versions.

TVP: This CD covers material that was already very powerful in its own right. Was it hard for you to keep things your own way when you were interpreting this work?

JO: The hardest part was just to get around the fear of taking on this material, which was done originally in an incredibly powerful way. I was nervous that people would assume that I was trying to out do some of these great soul artists, and that really wasn't the case at all. It is pretty much impossible to out do Aretha Franklin singing an Aretha Franklin song, or Otis Redding or any of these people. These are my heroes. I'm not trying to go them one better. I believe that the material deserves to be seen in a little bit of a different light so that audiences could hear them in a different way and appreciate the song all over again. That was part of the challenge- to take these songs and find a way to de them in a way that was respectful of the songs themselves without imitating the earlier versions. Myself and the producer John Leventhal, worked very hard to bring something new to the productions. The minimalist Hip Hop approach was one of the ways we got to that point. I did a lot of work in my home studio before we went to the studio in New York to figure out where the song and my voice intersected in a way that was somehow compelling, interesting, authentic. The process was to strip it down and start out with my voice and a beat, or my voice and a guitar and find a place where the song and my voice were interacting in a special way.

TVP: Some of those tracks ended up with strong backing. That was part of the re-constructing process after you brought it down to its bare elements?

JO: Once we figured out what the bones were, we could go in and add things that were needed, but all the while making sure that we didn't put too much in there. That's a part of the process when you're making a record. You get all these ideas and you add all these different tracks and guitars and this and that and everything else on top of it. You have to be very vigilant that you don't put things in there just for the sake of putting them in there. So that was part of the process: coming up with these ideas, adding them, and editing what we had done to make sure that it was only the necessary bits that remain.

TVP: Do you think that your status as being an independent recorder helped you do what you wanted to do right now?

JO: It helped me to make this record quickly and to get something out in this world relatively quickly. Some of the situations that I was in before with major labels were difficult in that I would make music and turning into the label and they would send me back to the drawing board over and over again. That became very frustrating, so I was happy to just make the record and say "OK, the record is done," and have it come out just a few months later.

TVP: I think it was the authenticity of your album "Relish" that made it such a smash hit.

JO: That's what I strive for. It is very easy to imitate your heroes when you're first learning. Then you need to get to a place where you're doing something original and uniquely your own- that has that authenticity to it. That's what I really strive to do. I'm glad that you're hearing that in the music. Thank you for saying that.

TVP: It strikes me that your record label decided that they wanted less authenticity.

JO: It's certainly not that cut and dry. No one came to the studio and said "I want you to do X, Y and Z, and we want you to do a song just like "One of Us." It was a case of me wanting to do something interesting for myself: add some of the influences that I had been learning about, in particular Qawwali music, to what I was doing, and work with people that I was excited about working with. I think that they just wanted a bunch of pop hit songs. I don't know what they were looking for, but it happened that I didn't give them what they wanted. That was a very frustrating time. I don't think that you have to be with an independent label to be able to follow your vision musically or that Indy labels make the best music or that major labels make the best music. I think it doesn't really matter. It's whatever situation works best for the individual. I'm happy that I'm in a situation where I have more autonomy right now.

[Qawwali is the traditional form of Islamic song found in India and Pakistan. A Qawwal is one who sings qawwali, or the dictums of the prophets and praises of God. Though probably much older, Qawwali musical techniques have been described for over 1000 years as a means of bringing about enlightenment. Nusrat Fatah Aki Khan was considered the foremost practitioner of the form.]

TVP: I have to ask you what it was like to work with Nusrat Fatah Aki Khan

JO: He was wonderful. He was really generous. He comes from a tradition that can be very circumscribed, and closed to outsiders, in particular women. He was one of the people in Qawwali music who was very much open to working with other collaborators and very much open to bringing the music to new audiences through those collaborations and through opening up the channels to work with other artists. He was very generous in that way.

He had planned to take me on as a student and we had done a few lessons together when he had to go back to Pakistan and ended up passing away during that time. I feel that I was very lucky to spend the time with him that I did. Part of me wishes that I had met him years earlier, that I could have become one of his students and learned a lot more from him.

TVP: He selected you to take part in his exercises.

JO: I made it no secret that I was a fan of his and that I wanted to learn about Qawwali music and I think his manager heard me saying this in an interview and picked up on that and told Nusrat about it. So when I finally did meet him for the first time, we were doing a televised special for VH1 and I finally met him back stage. He invited me into the dressing room and said "So you are the one who wanted to sing Qawwali " and he gave me a little sort of test. He said, "why don't you sing this for me," and he played a melody on the harmonium, so I did. He played me another one and I repeated it. This went on for a few minutes and finally he stopped playing and looked around at the other men in his group and said "Oh yes, we can teach you!" I was so excited at that moment to have passed the audition or whatever it was.

TVP: The other significant performer beside yourself who worked with Nusrat was Jeff Buckly. [Grace, Sony Records, 1994]

JO: He was really special.

TVP: Your and Jeff's music share a profoundly expressive, emotive quality. I would guess that's what drew Nusrat to you.

JO: Personally I think that's the kind of thing that music is here for on Earth, to allow people to step outside that sort of day-to-day consciousness or reality or dealing with business, or whatever, and get to a state where you're more aware of yourself as a spiritual being and you're more aware of expressing your emotions and your spirituality. I feel that that's music's mission in the world, at least one of the things that it can do. So I've always been drawn to that kind of music.

Whenever I saw Jeff I could always see that this was obviously part of his approach as well. He obviously felt that kind of freedom and release when he was making his music. Then you would meet him and he was always this shy, quiet kind of person. I think music enabled him to get to places that he wasn't able to get to in his day-to-day life, which is what I think it does for everyone who loves music.

TVP: This is a good time to ask you a question that I've been dying to ask you. How did it feel to be covered by Dr. Evil and Mini Me in The Spy Who Shagged Me?

JO: I'm sure they sent me some kind of a thing to sign to let them use "One of Us" but I had completely forgotten. A year later when the movie came out a guy I was dating at the time said "Lets go see a movie." We went and sat in the theatre and we got there late so we had to sit right in the front row. So of course the screen was looming hugely above our heads. And the minute Dr. Evil started singing that song I was so embarrassed I just wanted the floor to open and swallow me up. [Laughter] It was definitely a bizarre moment.

TVP: Can you tell me a little about your time at N.Y.U. when you first started performing?

JO: I'd actually stopped taking classes and was working a couple different jobs to save some money to go back to school and finish my degree. I was putting myself through school, and NYU was expensive, and living in New York is expensive and film is very expensive, so it was always a real struggle for me financially to keep it together. So I was in a period where I had stopped taking classes for a semester. I was working a bunch of jobs and trying to save money for that. That's when I discovered this whole scene that was going on in New York City at the time, people doing Roots music and Blues music. It was purely by accident. I didn't think I was going to do music for a living or anything. I was still very focused on studying film.

But a friend of mine in my apartment complex said "Hey lets go down to this club on the corner and get a beer." So I went and this place was a Blues bar. It was very late and the band had torn down but there was this piano player there who was playing for himself or the few people that were still there. My friend dared me to go up and sing a song. I have no idea why, he had never heard me sing. He was just trying to embarrass me or something, and I said "Ok, I will." I went over and sang "God Bless the Child," a Billie Holiday song and when it was done the piano player said "Hey, that was pretty good. You should come back to our Open Mic Night that we have every Tuesday night." I started doing that. This place was right around the corner from where I lived.

There was something about the act of singing that really turned my head around. I thing there was something about the immediacy of it that was in contrast to the very lengthy process of making a film. Film is much more of an intellectual pursuit, and music, for me, is more of an instinctive thing. There was something about it that captured my imagination, and I kept coming back. I found out about other places that had Open Mic nights and I went to those places. I started meeting musicians and putting together my own band out of people I met. And after a while I actually started playing gigs in some of these little clubs. It slowly grew and grew to the point where I was doing five or six nights a week. I was able to quit my day job. At that point it was "Do I go back to school and forget about this, or continue on with this thing that seems to have a life of its own?" I chose to follow it.

TVP: It's almost like the universe gave you a little nudge in the direction of music.

JO: Yeah, I've thought about it many times, the hand of fate or whatever. I was on a completely different path and it was totally by accident that I ended up doing music.

TVP: When you played with Bob Dylan, did he have anything to say about "The Man in the Long Black Coat" from your album Relish?

JO: He didn't say anything to me about covering his song at all, but his manager was very complimentary and had told me several times "You know, Bob really likes the way you did that song." But Bob never said anything, so I don't know if it's true or not.

TVP: It's an astonishing song, the way you performed it.

JO: I love doing that song, and I loved the moment of doing it, when we were on the Relish tour. There were a lot of young girls in the audience, and for me the song was very much about this dangerous person who comes into a girl's life and sweeps her away and I could tell there was something that really struck a chord to these girls who were like 14, 15 and 16. They always reacted very strongly to that song, and for me that was a wonderful thing. These are girls who will never go see a Bob Dylan concert, yet they're able to appreciate this song in a way that's in a completely different context and with a different reading than the one the original writer gave to it. That's just one of the wonderful things about music. Someone can write a song and perform it, and have it mean something very wonderful and very specific to them. Yet, another artist can come along, take the song, do something different with it, and magnify the impact of the song.

TVP: What kind of advice would you like to impart to young musicians trying to break into the industry?

JO: My first piece of advice would be to do it because you love to do it and because you enjoy doing it even at the smallest level, playing for free or for only a handful of people. If you can love doing that then that's the best reason to do it, for the love of music. Its such hard work and you have to dedicate yourself to it completely. You end up spending many, many months away from home, away from your family.

Its not the most stable occupation in the world, so if you're doing it for the money, you're definitely in the wrong business. Do it for the love of it. You can write songs if you're a songwriter and spend as much time as you can writing the best songs you can, because that's where you live or die, by your material.

TVP: In conclusion, do you have anything you want to say in general?

JO: I really wanted to make a record that was very relevant and very topical with what people are dealing with right now, and that's why I chose the songs that I chose, the ones that are political and the ones that are talking about brotherhood, peace. These are the things that I hear people around me talking about all the time, the things I think about, the things you see when you turn on your TV. I really wanted to make a record that could be part of this moment.