Joan Osborne - St. Teresa

What this video is

Released in May 1996, 'St. Teresa' arrived at a peak moment of female alt-rock visibility on MTV, sandwiched between the dominance of Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill cycle and the nascent Lilith Fair movement. The song was written about a sex worker and drug dealer Osborne observed in her Manhattan neighborhood, and the video translates that street-level urban mysticism into a contained hotel-room surrealist…

Why it matters

A key secondary single from one of the most critically acclaimed alt-rock debut albums of 1995–96, 'St. Teresa' exemplifies the blues-inflected, spiritually charged strand of 1990s female rock. The self-directed video is notable as a rare mid-90s major-label music video conceived and executed…

The director

Joan Elizabeth Osborne (born July 8, 1962, Anchorage, Kentucky) is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-genre performer. She moved to New York City in the late 1980s to study filmmaking at New York University, giving her a formal visual arts background…