Joan Osborne will release her first album of all-new material in six years this September. Trouble and Strife is the soul singer’s 10th studio LP and comments on various social issues of life in 2020.
In a statement, Osborne says the album is “a recognition of the important role music has to play in this moment. Music has a unique ability to re-energize people and allow us to continue to hang on to that sense of joy of being alive.”
Osborne, who shot to fame in 1995 with the album Relish and its hit “One of Us,” previews Trouble and Strife with the new song “Boy Dontcha Know.” Out now, the buoyant track addresses gender nonconformity, with Osborne inhabiting the role of a person born female but wishing to live as a man. “She sees them out on the street in the morning/the hard legs and the slim-hipped walk,” Osborne sings. “When they look down there’s no blood in the water/and people listen to them when they talk.”
In the years after the success of “One of Us,” Osborne went on to become a revered vocalist in the classic rock, soul and jam worlds. She joined members of the Grateful Dead as the Dead and toured with the band through 2004 and, in 2014, recorded and toured with Steve Gorman’s Trigger Hippy. Trouble and Strife, released via her own Womanly Hips label, arrives September 18th and follows up a 2017 tribute to Bob Dylan and the original material album Love and Hate in 2014.
