Joan Osborne, singer
Rob Hyman from the Hooters came to my show at a club in Philadelphia and said: “You’re amazing.” He told me his friend Rick Chertoff, a producer and the boss of the Blue Gorilla label, was looking for artists and said: “I think he’d love you.” At that point in my career, I’d heard a lot of stuff from guys in bars at the end of the night, but I got Rick’s number. He was very thoughtful and suggested putting me together with Rob and Eric from the Hooters.
We were working in this little crawl space studio that Rob had above his garage in Philly when Eric played us a demo of One of Us, which he was intending to send to the Crash Test Dummies. Rick immediately said: “No, you’re going to give that song to Joan.” He was very insistent. The chorus reminded me of the sort of question a kid might ask a parent: “What if God was one of us?” So when I sang it I played up that kind of innocence.
I remember asking if there was another way of expressing whether God was “just a slob like one of us”, but Rick insisted that line would grab people’s attention. I’d just discovered a 1930s singer called Nell Hampton on an album of Appalachian folk songs and was playing it in the studio, so Rick suggested placing a snippet of her at the start. I didn’t even dream of the song becoming a sensation, but a radio station in Atlanta started playing it and people wanted to hear it again and again. Other stations followed suit.
The lyrics play with deeper concepts like the good Samaritan or the Buddhist view that God is in all of us, but conservative religious groups took great exception because it flew in the face of their view that humans are inherently sinful and nothing like God. I was getting death threats and people were picketing my concerts. Thankfully that was a fleeting thing.
At the time I’d been thinking of getting a nose ring so had been experimenting with clip-on ones, which 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 Bazilian, songwriter
The Hooters were playing a festival in Sweden and I met a Swedish girl, Sarah, on the plane and we started talking. We stayed in touch, met up again in Sweden and then in Germany. Eventually, rather than continue all this transatlantic dating, 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 four-track recording. I had a four-track so she said: “Record something.” I’d been playing a guitar riff all day so recorded it in a song structure and she asked me to sing it. But I didn’t have any lyrics. Then she fell asleep, and I found I had the voice of Brad Roberts from the Crash Test Dummies in my head. The lyrics just tumbled out.
The key line is: “What would you ask if you just had one question?” 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 out of the water. 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 ‘trying to make his way home’?” It was perfect.
I’ve had to explain many times that I’m not calling God a slob, and that it’s 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 in such a wide-eyed way but has the voice of experience. So it’s a grownup voice with a child’s imagination.
When we’d finished recording it, we all looked round the room. I had the same feeling that I had when Rob and Cyndi Lauper played their first draft of Time After Time. I knew that we were going to be hearing this for the rest of our lives.
• Joan Osborne plays the Union Chapel, London, on 2 July. Her album Nobody Owns You is out now
