It’s morning in Brooklyn and Joan Osborne’s cats are in a snit. The blues-rock singer was supposed to come home last night but wound up working late on a video shoot in upstate New York. When she finally drove back to the city she found herself stuck in traffic.

“I was late getting home, so now my cats are very mad at me,” she says over the phone with a sigh and a laugh. “Other than that, it’s all good.”

Despite the hectic morning and fuming felines, Osborne is riding high on the career front. Her new album “Songs of Bob Dylan” — released on Osborne’s own long-running label Womanly Hips Records — features the soulful vocalist putting an interpretive spin on the rock legend’s tunes.

Osborne culls 13 songs from Dylan’s vast oeuvre. She draws material from his folk era (“Masters of War”), his pioneering electric period (“Highway 61 Revisited”) and later work (“Dark Eyes” from the 1985 album “Empire Burlesque”).

Her ninth studio album was inspired by the singer’s two performance residencies at the Cafe Carlyle in New York City. Over a couple of two-week stretches in 2016 and 2017, she appeared at the venue in her show “Joan Osborne Sings the Songs of Bob Dylan.”

Located on the Upper East Side in the Carlyle Hotel, the Cafe Carlyle is an intimate room known for showcasing top-tier jazz and cabaret performers. The place is an atmospheric slice of old-school Manhattan nightlife. It features fancy cocktails and vintage wall murals by Marcel Vertes, a French designer and illustrator who won two Oscars for his work on the 1952 film classic of Parisian bohemia “Moulin Rouge.”

Osborne admits she was somewhat perplexed when she was initially approached about the Carlyle gig.

“When we got the call to do the show I was a little taken aback because I’m not really a cabaret singer,” she recalls. “It took me a minute to figure out what to do. I wanted to play the room and honor the history of the place, but I also wanted to do something that was right for me. That’s when I brought out this idea I had in the back of my mind about doing a songbook series. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Ella Fitzgerald released a series where she would pick a songwriter or a writing team and do an entire album of that material. She made a number of records like that. I always thought it would be great to do my own version and pick the writers I was drawn to.”

As she considered the potential songsmiths she wanted to cover, Bob Dylan was at the top of the list.

“I chose him partly because of the wealth of material,” she explains. “You could do 100 Dylan songs and still not run out of great songs. I felt that would make our job easier in creating a series of shows out of his material — if you try one song and it doesn’t work for some reason, there are hundreds of others. Also, I love singing his songs. I’ve recorded some of Dylan’s songs before and have had the honor of singing with him a couple of times. It seemed like the right step to take.”

When Osborne brought the Dylan idea to the folks at the Carlyle, they were completely on board. Over her two residencies, she was joined onstage by Jack Petruzzelli on guitar and Keith Cotton on keyboards. The three collaborators decided on the front end that they didn’t want to mimic Dylan’s original versions. Instead, they took an expansive approach to the material and explored different and sometimes unexpected arrangements. Osborne and crew wanted to bring a fresh perspective to the work.

“The shows at the Carlyle became the impetus for doing the record,” she says. “We were able to test out the idea in a live setting and see if we could do something unique with the material.”

Performing the songs night after night in a small room was an exciting project for Osborne. It was a challenging one as well.

“I started to feel what an actor must feel when they do Shakespeare because the material is so rich and has so much depth,” she notes. “Everything is there — humor, romance, drama, cynicism, innocence. I felt so privileged to be able to do it.”

On the new album, Osborne also interprets several tracks from Dylan’s classic 1975 album “Blood On the Tracks.” “Tangled Up In Blue” is drenched in a slinky Memphis soul vibe. The sweet and lilting “Buckets of Rain” is rendered as a piano and acoustic guitar blues number.

“Dylan is known for his lyrics, which at times can be overtly political, surreal, biting and cruel,” she says. “But he’s also able to write gentle, tender love songs that break your heart. ‘Buckets of Rain’ is one of those. It’s like a butterfly floating by in the air. It has such beauty and simplicity to it.”

The new release is a strong addition to Osborne’s catalog. She broke big on the music scene with her 1995 major label debut “Relish.” That release yielded the massive hit “One of Us,” a crunchy and mournful blues-rocker that featured Osborne’s bittersweet vocal. Since then she’s maintained a successful solo career while juggling other projects, including stints with the Grateful Dead spinoff band The Dead and Motown musicians the Funk Brothers.

A Kentucky native, Osborne moved to New York City in the early 1980s to attend film school at New York University. But her original dream to be a documentary filmmaker was soon supplanted when a friend dared her to sing at an open mic. Osborne was a hit and soon became a fixture at a blues club where she sang regularly and met other musicians.

“Singing in general and singing blues in particular was very galvanizing for me,” she recalls. “There was something about the immediacy of music. There’s an instantaneous connection if you’re in front of an audience.”

She dropped out of college, briefly worked a day job and seriously pursued music. The New York clubs she frequented played host to up-and-coming artists like the jam band Blues Traveler and alt-folk artists Jeff Buckley and Chris Whitley. Osborne worked the blues circuit in the city including the venues Delta 88 and Manny’s Car Wash.

She also played some of Dylan’s old haunts, including the venerable music room Gerde’s Folk City. Although the man himself had long since moved on to international stardom, his influence still permeated the atmosphere.

“The ghost of Dylan was always around there,” she says. “His stuff has never gone out of style.”