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Joan Osborne, singer
Rob Hyman from Hooters came to my show at a club in Philadelphia and said, “You guys are amazing.” He told me that his friend Rick Chertoff, producer and head of the Blue Gorilla label, was looking for artists and said, “I think he’s going to you liked it.” At this point in my career, I had heard a lot from guys in bars at the end of the night, but I got Rick’s number. He was very thoughtful and offered to set me up with Rob and Eric from Hooters.
We were working in this little crawl studio that Rob had above his garage in Philly when Eric played us a demo of One of Us that he was going to send to Crash Test Dummies. Rick immediately said, “No, you’re going to give this song to Joan.” He was very insistent. The chorus reminded me of the question a child might ask a parent, “What if God was one of us?” So when I sang it, I played that kind of innocence.
I remember asking if there was another way to express whether God is “just a slob like one of us,” but Rick insisted that line would get people’s attention. I had just discovered a singer from the 1930s named Nell Hampton on an album of Appalachian folk songs and was playing her in the studio, so Rick suggested I put a snippet of her in the beginning. I never dreamed the song would become a hit, but a radio station in Atlanta started playing it and people wanted to hear it over and over again. Other stations followed suit.
The lyrics play with deeper concepts like the Good Samaritan or the Buddhist view that God is within all of us, but conservative religious groups took a big exception because they opposed their view that humans are inherently sinful and unlike God. I received death threats and people picketed my concerts. Fortunately, it was a fleeting thing.
Then I was thinking about getting a nose ring, so I experimented with the ones with clips that I’m wearing in the video. When the video was shown everywhere, I thought, “Oh my God, I’m going to be such a poser if I don’t have a real one.” So I ran out and got one and had it for a long time.
Eric Basilian, songwriter
The Hooters were playing a festival in Sweden and I met a Swedish girl, Sarah, on the plane and we started talking. We kept in touch, met again in Sweden and then in Germany. In the end, instead of continuing all these transatlantic meetings, I asked her to come and stay with me in Philadelphia while we were making Joan’s album, Relish.
One night we were watching a documentary about the making of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album and she became curious about the four-song recording. I had four songs and she said, “Write something down.” I had been playing a guitar riff all day, so I wrote it down in a song structure and she asked me to sing it. But I had no lyrics. Then she fell asleep and I found myself having the voice of Brad Roberts from Crash Test Dummies in my head. The text just popped out.
The key line is, “If you only had one question, what would you ask?” But my first impression was that it wasn’t about God. It was about what would happen if you saw something that blew your worldview apart. I struggled with one line after “What if God was a … stranger on the bus?” I had “… in the dust”? Then Sarah woke up and suggested, “How about we ‘try to go home’?” It was perfect.
I had to explain many times that I wasn’t calling God a slob and that this was really a song about human beings. I can still picture Rick asking, “Joan, do you think you can sing that?” Her delivery was perfect because she asks the question so wide-eyed, but has the voice of experience. So it’s an adult voice with a child’s imagination.
When we finished recording, we all looked around the room. I had the same feeling I had when Rob and Cyndi Lauper released their first project Time After Time. I knew we would be listening to this for the rest of our lives.
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