This is not to say that she wasn’t born to loose her bluesy howl across the land. Her parents did, after all, meet while singing in the church choir. It just took her a while to find her way. Actually, it took a dare. In 1989 Osborne, then a film student at New York University,. ducked into a blues bar with a friend who dared her to hop on-stage and sing a tune. Her rendition of Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” led to open-mike nights and, in time, club dates. “It was difficult for me at first,” says Osborne of her baby steps onto the stage. “I couldn’t open my eyes; I couldn’t move around. I’d grab on to the mike stand for dear life. But there was something about it that kept me coming back.”
Sex soul: Audiences came back too. Osborne soon grew into one of New York’s great spectacles–a tornado of swaying hips and swirling coppery hair ripping through sexy soul classics like “Son of a Preacher Man” and “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” Osborne says she took her cue from the likes of Etta James and Tina Turner. “A lot of what they were about was projecting this kind of strong, earthy, playful sexuality which for me felt like a righteous way to look at it,” she says. “They weren’t airbrushed movie stars, but they were up there having fun and being very sexual, and a lot other things, too-strong and smart and funny: all the good things rolled into one.”
Osborne’s own mix is an enticing marriage of the sexual and the spiritual. “Relish” is the product of brain storming sessions-between Osborne and veteran musicians enlisted by Rick Chertoff, head of the Mercury offshoot label Blue Gorilla, and has been propelled since its release last March by the absurdly catchy, slightly dippy, meditation “One of Us.” (What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us? /Just a stranger on the bus / Tryin’ to make His way home?) “It’s kind of subversive,” says Osborne of the hit, written by collaborator Erie Bazilian. “It has a very interesting message, but it’s wrapped in this candy-coated pop song.” Osborne’s own songs are more tart, but every bit as impressive. The tense, mournful “St. Teresa,” for example, fuses the life of Saint Teresa of Avila, a 16th-century Spanish nun, with the bleak tale of a drug-addled streetwalker from the singer’s old Lower East Side neighborhood. Her next single, “Right Hand Man,” is a lustily rocking ode to a night well spent. “I’m just still learning about this,” she says. “I don’t feel like I’ve reached any kind of plateau or anything yet. It’s still a challenge for me.” As a friend found out in that New York bar, Osborne rises to a challenge.
