Singer-songwriter Joan Osborne was cleaning out her closets early in the pandemic when she stumbled on a treasure trove of musical memories: CDs, cassette tapes and files of her live radio station recordings, some dating back decades.
“All of the performances are really high quality and the audio is really high quality, too,” she said during a phone call from home in New York’s Catskills to talk about her Jan. 27 Fox Tucson Theatre show. “They are like little snapshots and little capsules of all the eras of us going on the road.”
As she listened to the recordings, she started to envision a retrospective of her 27-year journey that started with her triple-platinum 1995 debut album “Relish,” which was nominated for three Grammys.
Osborne compiled the recordings into a new album, “Radio Waves,” which she plans to release this spring.
Many of the songs had been recorded before; she has 11 studio albums and handful of live albums and compilations. But there also are songs that have never seen the light of day including a rough demo of Toshi Reagon’s “Real Love” that she recorded in her home studio.
“It is a little bit like looking at pictures of yourself from your yearbook or when you were in your teens or 20s. At the time, all you remember is how awkward you felt or you thought you looked great and then five years later you looked at that picture and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, my hair is terrible’,” said the 59-year-old mother of a teen daughter. “When you look at it again in your 50s, you’re like, ‘Oh, I was so cute back then. What was my problem?’”
Osborne will slip a few of those songs into her Fox show, which will focus largely on her 2020 album “Trouble and Strife.” The album, her first of original material in six years, is a reflection of the times we are experiencing, from COVID and the pandemic to political divisions and social and racial injustice.
Osborne has done a handful of live shows since the album dropped in fall 2020, including a Mother’s Day concert last May in Woodstock presented by musician Levon Helms’s daughter, Amy.
“I feel like communities need live music. It’s something that people have been starved for,” said Osborne, who is sharing the stage with her longtime keyboardist Keith Cotton and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Jack Petruzzelli. “Especially at a time like this when our country is so divided politically … it’s a very fractious time, and I think music has the ability to press the pause button on that and allows people who may not agree on anything else to be together and enjoy music.”
