Just Like One of Us . . . : Joan Osborne remembers what it's like to be in despair. Now she's learned to lift herself up by singing about the personal struggle.

By Richard Cromelin

Dec. 10, 1995 12 AM PT

<i> Richard Cromelin writes about pop music for Calendar</i>

You don’t expect the woman who wrote and sings “Right Hand Man,” a morning-after salute to a night of sex, to be reticent about much of anything, but in this case, Joan Osborne isn’t going all the way.

The 33-year-old Kentucky native has been talking about her song “Crazy Baby,” in which she encourages a suicidal friend to stick around.

“If I hadn’t been through some really dark, depressing times and come out the other side, I would not know how it feels to feel like you can’t even move a muscle because you’re just paralyzed with your own doubt and indecision. . . . ,” Osborne explains, sitting in the small back room of her tour bus a few hours before her show at the Palace.

“It was a really crummy part of my life. Just being poor and alone and in a chaotic place. . . . New York has got that kind of really dark energy, and if you’re in a dark place with yourself personally it can be the worst possible spot to be. . . .”

Suddenly Osborne seems to catch herself in uncomfortable territory.

“I just would rather not go into it,” she says, politely but firmly. “I don’t feel it’s all that relevant to people hearing and understanding the music, which is the reason I do this.”

If Osborne is hesitant to reveal herself in an interview, her willingness to let it all hang out, so to speak, in her music has helped make her one of the year’s most prominent pop-music arrivals.

Her major-label debut album, “Relish,” has sold nearly half a million copies since its release in March, and she has become a solid presence in the new surge of female artists, singing alongside longtime booster Melissa Etheridge on the latter’s VH1 “Duets” show, and joining Alanis Morissette in the embrace of both alternative and mainstream radio (both singers will perform at KROQ’s “Almost Acoustic Christmas” concerts next Sunday and Dec. 18 at the Universal Amphitheatre).

Osborne has drawn comparisons to Morissette on the cutting-edge side and Bonnie Raitt on the traditional, and she does often occupy a zone somewhere between the two, bringing an experimental spirit and confessional approach to a soul-blues foundation.

Right now, radio is playing a lot of her single “One of Us,” a song written by Eric Bazilian that imagines God as “a slob like one of us, just a stranger on the bus.” Osborne’s own lyrics range from the cinematic narrative of “Pensacola,” in which she makes a disillusioning visit to her estranged father, to the juxtaposition of religious mysticism and gritty street life in “St. Theresa.”

And then there’s “Right Hand Man,” a bawdy celebration based on a Captain Beefheart riff that will be released as her next single in January. The song opens with the provocative lines:

Lemme use your toothbrush.

Have you got a clean shirt.

My panties in a wad

At the bottom of my purse.

“I remember when I wrote those lines . . . ,” she says. “I mean, that’s a moment that I’ve had, but I just felt like, ‘I could never put this in a song, it’s too real, there’s something too embarrassing about it.’

“But I kept it in mind for a few days, and as I read it over and over again, ‘Well, why not? It is something that is probably understandable to a lot of people, so why not?’ ”

Osborne’s blue nail polish and an eyeball ring are the only signs of flamboyance as she sits and talks in her bus. But in a couple of hours the soft-spoken singer will be transformed into a tambourine-shaking, hip-swinging performer, playfully manipulating the Palace crowd and earning whoops of approval for her raw, intense vocals.

It comes easily now for Osborne after years of seasoning on the East Coast bar-band circuit--a scene she stumbled across while attending film school at New York University in the early ‘80s. It was her dark time, and the music was a rescue line.

“I discovered a community of bands and musicians and clubs, and that was probably the strongest reason in the beginning to be doing it--to be involved in that community,” says Osborne, who grew up in a suburb of Louisville. “It was just so much fun. There were so many cool bands and I wanted to meet the players and hang out with them. I just wanted to be part of it.”

As Osborne established herself as a performer, she began handling the business side of things as well, and in 1992 she released a live album, “Soul Show,” on her own label, Womanly Hips Music. She followed it in 1993 with “Blue Million Miles,” an EP of three studio-recorded songs.

Her heavy performing schedule eventually paid off when she came to the attention of record producer Rick Chertoff, who signed her to his Mercury-affiliated Blue Gorilla label. Chertoff, guitarist Bazilian and keyboardist Rob Hyman--a team best-known for its work on Cyndi Lauper’s 1984 debut album, “She’s So Unusual”--convened to shape the sound and songs of “Relish.”

“We were ready to experiment,” Chertoff says in a separate interview. “We wanted to keep it what I call for lack of a better description, blues-friendly. . . . Not a traditional blues record, but something inspired by the blues and gospel and the kind of Appalachian modal stuff that she and I both love.”

While the album has been praised as innovative, Osborne--whose early favorites were such artists as Gladys Knight, the Spinners, the Temptations and the O’Jays--doesn’t see it that way. She sees herself as simply part of a tradition, one that has been blessed with several engaging female performers.

“I think it’s maybe just taking that energy and putting it in a more modern perspective or maybe a more white-world perspective or whatever. . . . Maybe it’s just reaching an audience that hasn’t been aware of it before,” she says.

After getting a signal that it’s time to gather with her band for the pre-show sound check, Osborne pauses to complete her thought . . . about her goals and her tradition.

“The people who I was really trying to emulate, especially in the beginning, were the soul singers and R&B; singers who had that ability to be very real, be very human, be vulnerable and maybe foolish, but at the same time very strong and very sexy,” she continues.

“To me that was very impressive. They had all this power but they weren’t these perfect, Hollywood, airbrushed kind of people. They were very real and able to lay it down and sing songs about really intimate personal struggles and be somehow lifted up by singing about them. . . . It’s the basic reason that people do music in the first place I guess.”*

* Joan Osborne appears at the KROQ “Almost Acoustic Christmas” concerts next Sunday and Dec. 18 at the Universal Amphitheatre, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City. 6:15 p.m. Sold out. (818) 980-9421.