Joan Osborne

The 1995 hit “One Of Us” was not written by Joan Osborne, but one might be shocked to realize this fact. Maybe it’s because Osborne reached fame during a zeitgeist of women songwriters performing somewhere on the spectrum from funk to folk, or maybe it’s because she sang the searching ditty with such guileless conviction that the words seemed hers and hers alone. Osborne has written her own music over the years, but she’s also continued to interpret the songs of others with her honeyed voice, most recently releasing an album of Bob Dylan covers.  —Josephine McRobbie