Dave Gil de Rubio

With her rich vocals and knack for belting out R&B, be it her own material or the string of covers she’s done on recent albums, it’s also nice when Joan Osborne decides to change things up a bit. Such is the case with her eighth studio album.

For hip-hop fans, eight miles may bring to mind the stretch of street in Detroit’s Mile Road System. But for a generation of readers, it’s a direct reference to the amount of bookshelves Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George F. Will was alluding to in a ‘70s column he was writing about the Strand.