Relishious

M.J. Fine Does It Again

by M.J. Fine

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Published: Apr 1, 2009

Making your way home isn't always a simple enterprise. You can't get there just by turning around and retracing your steps, as Joan Osborne suggests on "Cathedrals." "In the cathedrals of New York and Rome/ There is a feeling that you should just go home," she belts, then dials it back a notch to add the kicker: "And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is."

It may as well be a lifetime since 1995, when Osborne released Relish just ahead of the Lilith Fair curve. She's spent the intervening years dipping into country, soul and gospel, and she's sung the hell out of other people's songs with The Dead and The Funk Brothers and on her own covers collections. On Little Wild One, her seventh studio album, the Kentucky native finds her heart in New York City. She takes the high road to Walt Whitman's Brooklyn on "Sweeter Than the Rest," praises the neighborhoods on "Hallelujah in the City" and draws disco inspiration on the lusty "Can't Say No." And "Cathedrals," the record's only borrowed song, is no less majestic just because Jump, Little Children got there first. So what if Gotham's not Osborne's ancestral home? Her heart — and everything else, for that matter — are in the right place.

Little Wild One is a homecoming in another way: It reunites Osborne with Rick Chertoff, Rob Hyman and Eric Bazilian, who first put Osborne on the map with Relish. "One of Us," penned by Bazilian, watches God with an empathetic eye: "He's trying to make his way home/ Back up to heaven all alone/ Nobody callin' on the phone/ 'Cept for the Pope maybe in Rome." Maybe you thought "One of Us" was clever on first listen, or maybe you thought it was corny. Either way, you probably got sick of it somewhere between the second and the hundredth listen. But, miraculously, that riff still works whether or not you believe in it.

Osborne's pipes — raspy on "St. Teresa," powerful on "Ladder" and the Ray Charles nod "Spider Web" — elevate nearly everything they touch, but Bazilian's occasional overplaying grates, as does the forced carnality of "Right Hand Man" and "Let's Just Get Naked." Familiar as it sounds, Relish lacks the intimacy that Osborne would cultivate later. But it's not a bad place to start.

(m_fine@citypaper.net)

Joan Osborne plays the Sellersville Theater on Fri., April 3.

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