A RIGHTEOUS RETURN
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“I was trying to make a record I liked, working with several different producers in a number of different situations, and I guess the label got tired of waiting,” Osborne told one writer. “It was a frustrating, difficult time, but it enabled me to make a fresh start. You gotta have a little faith, and as an artist, you can’t wait around for someone else to validate you. I was pretty confident that if I made a good record I’d have a place to go.”
Indeed. Teaming up with Froom, despite the lack of label support, turned out to be a brilliant move—they clicked immediately and together made an exceptional CD, Righteous Love, that was eagerly picked up by Interscope Records. The disc reflects Osborne’s tremendous growth as both a singer and songwriter. It’s brimming with smoldering R&B and rock grooves, strong and confident vocals, and imaginative instrumental arrangements that offer considerable textural variety under Osborne’s commanding voice. There’s a definite Middle Eastern influence in a couple of songs (a by-product of Osborne studying with the late, great Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn during her recording hiatus), some finger-poppin’ funk (including a raucous cover of Gary Wright’s “My Love Is Alive”), dashes of Beatles-inspired pop, gospel touches, and even an ethereal Dylan cover (“Make You Feel My Love”). It’s an eclectic melange, but Osborne has the voice and personality to pull it all together. There may not be a song on Righteous Love with the quirky, naïve charm of “One of Us,” but the new CD is solid through and through. It’s that rare CD with no weak songs.
The CD ended up being relatively easy to make—it was recorded in just 28 days at the Sound Factory in L.A. by Froom and engineer John Paterno, then mixed by Bob Clearmountain at his Mix This! Studio. But for many months before Froom and Paterno got involved, Osborne was foundering, unsure of which direction she wanted to take the material. “She tried a bunch of different scenarios, and for whatever reasons they weren’t satisfactory to her,” Froom comments. “It’s daunting when you’re coming off a big success. It’s like for some reason nothing is ever good enough.
“We had originally talked a little bit back toward the beginning and the timing hadn’t worked out,” Froom continues. “I liked her, and we met up once or twice over those years, and at a certain point she was getting pretty frustrated, so finally I was in a position where I had some time and we were talking and I said, ‘Well, if you want, give me everything you’ve done so far and maybe we’ll try something.’ She originally talked to me about working on two songs, ‘Righteous Love’ being one of them because she thought I’d like that. And, when I heard the tapes, I liked quite a few of the songs, so I said, ‘Instead of looking at one song as a single kind of thing, I’d like to start in and do four or five songs, and if we like it we’ll just keep going.’ And she was into that idea.
“A lot of the songs had been cut to be records by various people, and there were different versions of different songs. There were a lot of very good ideas on these tapes they’d done. She had developed a lot of vocal ideas, and there were some musical things that were pretty good. But a lot of it seemed sort of sonically dark to me and not outgoing enough for her voice and the way she delivers things. So in talking to her and listening to what she had done, I developed a concept of the way I thought the record should sound.”
The first thing Froom did when he came onboard was bring in some of his favorite players to be a band on the record: The core group of drummer Pete Thomas (of Elvis Costello fame), bassist Davey Faragher and guitarist Val McCallum have played on many records in L.A., have worked as the backing band for Vonda Shepherd on (and off) Ally McBeal and even have a semi-serious club band called Jackshit (as in “you don’t know jackshit”) that plays unusual country and rock cover tunes. Besides being a producer, Froom is an accomplished keyboardist and arranger, so he plays on the album, too, and he enlisted sax player Steve Berlin of Los Lobos for a few cuts; all in all, it’s a cookin’ little unit that frames Osborne’s vocals wonderfully.
Reprinted with permission from
Magazine, December, 2000© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved
