The Comfort Zone : Joan Osborne Echoes the Greats but Doesn’t Make Her Own Statement

Despite her delightful hit single and all those Grammy nominations, Joan Osborne really is just one of us.

Like 99% of the enthusiastic fans who saw her in concert Thursday at the Wiltern Theatre, the New York-based singer-songwriter’s vision of pop music is fairly much patched together from the works of artists she admires.

Over the course of her 90-minute set, she displayed echoes of the full-tilt boogie of Janis Joplin, the R&B; sass of Etta James and the blues-pop snap of Bonnie Raitt.

That’s enough to make her a star in a time when much of the pop world seems to crave the reassuring strains of Hootie & the Blowfish and others who recycle our past the way a microwave reheats a meal.

It’s not sufficient, however, to make Osborne an important artist.

The great pop figures aren’t commoners. They are the ones who build upon influences in meaningful ways.

Thankfully, we are blessed in the ‘90s with a cadre of talented young performers, mostly women, who have the potential to reshape the boundaries of pop, folk and rock--unique artists from P.J. Harvey and Courtney Love to Ani DiFranco and Me’Shell NdegeOcello, who speak about our times in fresh and revealing ways.

So, why isn’t Osborne one of them?

As a writer, Osborne--who co-wrote most of the songs on her “Relish” album with Eric Bazilian and others--is good at setting scenes. She brings audiences into the trailer park despair of “Pensacola” and on the sidewalk with the troubled soul in “St. Teresa.”

She’s not adept, however, at turning those scenes into meaningful exercises that liberate or enrich.

“Let’s Just Get Naked,” a song from the “Relish” album, is so ill-defined that Osborne felt obligated during the encore Thursday to explain that the song is about being intimate and open--least people would think it is just some kind of hedonistic anthem.

As a vocalist, Osborne can shout, scream and shriek in the blues belter tradition, yet she doesn’t really give a piece of her heart. She is often as unrevealing as her lyrics. When she sang Bob Dylan’s “Man in the Long Black Coat” on Thursday, she injected so little viewpoint in the song that Dylan himself would be hard pressed to explain what she’s trying to tell us.

Oddly, Osborne’s two best-known songs are her least typical. “One of Us,” a sweet tale of spiritual questioning that was written by Bazilian, has an inviting, child-like sing-along quality that Osborne captures well, but it’s so different from her normal style that it seemed a guest vocalist had come on stage when she sang the hit single Thursday.

“Right Hand Man,” an expression of sexual liberation and delight, has a Stones-ish spice and energy that rarely surfaces otherwise.

Backed by a four-piece band, Osborne came across throughout as competent, but uninspiring--an artist who, like Melissa Etheridge and Sheryl Crow, has found an audience by comforting rather than challenging.

G. Love and Special Sauce, who opened the concert, work hard at trying to forge everything from ‘70s soul and contemporary hip-hop into a meaningful ‘90s twist on the blues. Alas, they, too, seemed simply mundane.