Osborne, Joan

DM) Being a New Yorker now, how were you affected by the recent events of September 11th?

JO) The first thing I wanted to make sure I did was to spend time with the people who are important in my life. I have family and friends in New York, I've lived there a long time and consider myself a New Yorker. So my first order of business was to just to try to be with people I love and care about, and just to be more present in their lives. What I do for a living has a tendency to take me away from home a lot and keeps me very busy. Even though I have people that I care about, there are people I don't often get to spend the time with them that I want to. I just wanted to try to concentrate on living that way.

Also, like everybody else, I just wanted to do something to help out, so I did a lot of benefits for the fire department and fundraising. I also did some volunteer work at a Red Cross Center near the site of Ground Zero -- an intake for people who lived or worked in the area and were looking for assistance from the Red Cross. I was just really happy to do whatever I could. I think we were all looking towards each other for a sense of reassurance of how we're going to go on.

DM) Did the events then influence your latest album?

JO) I didn't want to make a record that was only about 9/11 -- that could only be enjoyed if you thought of it as a 9/11 thing -- but yes, the song selection is very different from the one I was working on a couple of months before. There are songs in there like, "Why Can't We Live Together," that I might have considered a bit of a naive song before all of this happened ... and in the wake of September 11th, it made me look at it in a different way, and think of it as a very simple sentence and a very simple question a lot of people are asking each other right now. So definitely the material is very much a reaction to what happened, and an attempt to make some music people will be able to hear and find their own feelings and concerns reflected in them.

DM) Was the original album that radically different?

JO) It actually was. I was working on it with a different producer in Los Angeles. It was actually leaning more towards a dance, party sort of record, which would have been a fun thing to do, but I didn't have any interest in doing something like that. I always thought it would be a fun record, but it wasn't the time to do such a thing.

DM) Has September 11th, changed you for the rest of your life?

JO) Before the 1-year anniversary, I would have days where I didn't think of it at all, but I think there's something about people in general and a life in a city like New York, which is so huge -- that life is bigger than one event, and that allows you to go on and continue doing what you're doing. I think things that are different are: my focus in less on trying to work all of the time and more on trying to work on things that are personally valuable, and also try to spend other time to do other things -- just to not be working all the time ... to be with my family, and to be with the people who I care about. I have a little house out in the country, and to spend time out with nature, and to be more conscious of the way I live my life, and it doesn't have to all be about work and my career.

DM) Does that negatively affect your career then?

JO) I think having a different focus and a different perspective aren't necessarily going to be a bad thing for my work. I do feel like I'm very lucky, and I have a work that is not only really fulfilling for me, but brings pleasure to other people. I really thought about it in the wake of this, and I think I'm able to do something that has meaning outside of my own little life and my own friends, and that's a real privilege. I think it's less about trying to make worse a smaller part of my life and more just trying to focus more, and do the important things. I don't have to do every single show or photo shoot, and that's fine. Maybe there will be a few opportunities I missed, but in the grand scheme of things, they're not that important.

DM) What would you say is the most important thing to you now?

JO) In my life as a person? Just appreciating everything that I have. I'm really so lucky to have a great family -- they all get along. We're really close -- we've been spending so much more time together in the last year, and that's such a wonderful thing. I have work I really enjoy. Even though it's sometimes frustrating and challenging, it's such a privilege to be able to do this for a living... I think to appreciate what I have and understand that, and to be focused on sharing it with other people.

DM) Have you already thought of work on your next album, and do you think its going to follow the same tone of what's important to you?

JO) Well, I'm not really sure. The thing I'm working on right now... I'm just going to try and relax, and let it be what it is, and not try to go into it with a lot of preconceived notions about what I need to talk about. I think, as a writer, you naturally gravitate toward things that are important to you and have meaning towards you, but I don't necessarily start out with a template. I try to relax and take pleasure in the process, and hopefully in that way, you're just naturally drawn to things that are important to you.

DM) On a slightly different note regarding this album ... when you take somebody else's song, it still requires your own interpretation to some degree. Were you able to use your own composition skills to express yourself with these songs?

JO) That's what every person who interprets the song really needs to do: find the way that they can bring the song to life. For any interpreter, whether it's a jazz interpreter to what not, that's kind of the job: to not imitate what's come before, but to bring something further to it and bring it to life. That was definitely the challenge, and I think it was particular challenging with this project because we knew we were looking at materials that were classical American songs, where the original version are probably the definitive versions of them. We didn't try to outdo anybody or pretend like we were going to make a soul record that was better than some other record. We just tried to find a place where the song and my voice connected that was the most authentic to me.