With a bigger-than-usual band and featured appearances from Amy Helm, Robert Randolph and Jackie Greene, Joan Osborne goes back to the well to create the gusher that is Dylanology Live. 

Reprising six songs from 2017’s Songs of Bob Dylan, leaving others to rest and adding “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” where Randolph’s pedal steel slices through the music, and a stunning Trigger Hippy reunion between Osborne and Greene, who duet convincingly on “Tonight I’ll be Staying Here with You,” it’s a brilliant addition to the fat canon of tributes to the Bard. 

Typically a duo or trio act, Osborne wasted no expense for Dylanology, recruiting guitarists Jack Petruzzelli and Andrew Carillo, keyboardist Keith Cotton, bassist Richard Hammond, and drummer Aaron Comess to anchor Dylan’s songbook and provide her with an “amazing conglomeration of really talented people,” as she puts it between radical rearrangements of “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Rainy Day Woman #12 and #35,” which sound like Joan Osborne songs in this setting.  

Like the preceding, the slinky, show-opening “Spanish Harlem Incident” is sans guests. Feminine in the extreme, it finds Osborne’s lived-in voice cracking in all the right places and further illustrating the unfailing malleability of Dylan’s compositions. 

Osborne and Helm are joyful on “Buckets of Rain,” laughing off-mic and adding a whistling refrain. It’s a perfect foil to the seething “Masters of War” and the brooding “High Water for Charley Patton” that round out the LP.