She has six Grammy awards, three straight platinum-plus albums and killer cheekbones. If the comments of revered elders such as Bob Dylan and ex-beau Eric Clapton mean anything, she has risen to the top tier of ’90s songwriters with her knack for combining literate lyrics and melodies steeped in classic rock, soul and country. Unlike so many recent one-hit wonders, she has managed to survive the 15 minutes of awkward fame brought by the outsized success of her debut album, “Tuesday Night Music Club,” and has begun to forge a bona fide career in the classy, consistent mold of Tom Petty or Bonnie Raitt.
Yes, Sheryl Crow would appear to have it all. But a big question remains: Just who the heck is she? It’s hard to tell from her albums, which zig-zag from the hippie looseness of “Tuesday Night Music Club” (1993) to the glam-rock flashiness of “Sheryl Crow” (1996) to the singer-songwriter introspection of “The Globe Sessions” (1998).
Since the emergence of highly personal writers such as Dylan, John Lennon, Pete Townshend and Brian Wilson in the ’60s, rock has been synonymous with soul-baring honesty. But with rare exceptions Crow has always sounded like she’s holding something back, her songs thick with snappy wordplay but thin on self-revelation. What’s more, she owes so much to her musical heroes — Dylan and the Stones in particular — that her songs nearly always have a sleek, instant familiarity, rather than an idiosyncratic sense of self. She’s a proven craftsman, but is she a great artist? Not yet.
That said, her latest release, “The Globe Sessions” (A&M), is her best album and evidence of her continuing improvement. Even Dylan and the Stones took several albums and years of touring to grow into their sound, and Crow is following the same tack, the individuality of her voice emerging with greater clarity than ever in the raw ache of recent songs such as “It Don’t Hurt” and “The Difficult Kind.”
Crow was born 37 years ago in Kennett, Mo., 150 miles south of St. Louis, and her voice — husky from wear and tear on the road — still bears traces of a Southern accent. In an interview a few days before arriving in Chicago for shows Thursday and Friday at the Arie Crown, Crow discussed the price of artistic growth.
Tribune–You spent $450,000 to record your first album, then scrapped it. Why?
Crow–I had to go in and plead with the label not to release it. The producer (Hugh Padgham) brought me to the label, but we never had a common mind-set on what kind of album it should be. I wanted to make a rock album and he wanted to make a lush album based on my demos, which were very slick. I thought if the label put that out, it would make the wrong first impression and it would be impossible for me to tour behind it.
Q–The first album had a very loose, groove-based feel and was very successful. Why then did you make that hard left turn to the harsher images and sound on the second album? It seemed like you were trying to keep listeners from getting a fix on the person writing the songs.
A–Just because you write narratively doesn’t necessarily mean that your own very strong point of view isn’t present. The luxury of my job is that I can create any scenario and still say what I have to say. There were songs like “Home” (on the second album) that were strictly autobiographical. But my objective has never been for the world to be a part of my life. I don’t care for the world to know exactly who I am.
Q–Then why write?
A–My point is that you don’t sit down to write a song necessarily with a specific intent, other than to write about what concerns you at that moment. When I wrote “Sweet Rosalyn” (a song about a stripper for the second album), it was exactly about what was going on in my life at that time. I wasn’t stripping physically, but metaphorically I felt like I was stripping because the press had gone really negative. All these things in the songs were metaphors for what was going on in my personal life. There was some masking going on there, but I love writing in a lot of different mediums: short stories, poetry. So what’s going on in my life is evident in almost every single song, but I’m also enjoying the process of writing about characters.
Q–On “The Globe Sessions,” the perspective shifts to first person, and you’re writing a lot more directly about relationships — there isn’t as much distance between the songwriter and the character in the song. Why the shift?
A–I had just moved to New York City (after living in Los Angeles since the mid-’80s), and I didn’t know a lot of people there, and was going through a lonely time. I had just come off the road and was thinking about what I didn’t have in my life. I had let my life at home go, my relationships had fallen apart, I lost friends because I had been gone so long. I didn’t really have a place I could call home anymore. All that stuff started to wash over me and overwhelm me. Going to New York was an attempt to escape that, and the studio I bought became my safe haven. I wrote all these first-person songs in that cocoon.
But I’ll be honest–when the album was finished and I read the release date in a newspaper, I bawled. “What am I thinking? How can I put put this album out? It sounds whiny and personal and no one should ever hear it.” I called my manager, and I actually had the label yank it off the release schedule. There was all this turmoil. The initial panic of having to go out and perform these songs and talk about them became more than I could deal with. There was something cathartic about going into my studio to write these songs, but to actually release them to the world not only seemed overwhelming but ridiculous to me. I mean, who was going to care about this stuff? I had this freak-out moment, and then I just let go of it (laughs).
Q–It always amazed me how somebody like Lennon could write those songs about his most honest, impolite feelings and put them on a record, to be dissected by millions of listeners.
A–He’s an interesting study because there were so many things about him that were really childlike and at the same time he could come off really cynical. I think what people in the press forget is that people who write songs are sensitive and open and it’s their job to tap into that sort of thing. It’s just the nature of the beast that media overall has gotten pretty jaded and celebrities are created so quickly that we dispose of them just as quickly. It makes you very protective of your art and it makes you leery of ever putting it out. I found that not reading anything about anything — maybe it’s an escapist attitude — has allowed me to gain a healthier perspective about what I do. I have not read a (music) magazine in maybe three years.
Q–How has that affected your music?
A–It’s made me not be as cynical as I was on the second album. I look at the artwork on that album (which pictured Crow in garish makeup) and I had to do a lot of explaining about that. But that to me was justified. I felt like I was exposed to the world and the world doesn’t like me anymore because I’m extremely familiar and I’ve been scrutinized up and down. I took it all really seriously.
Q–I think a more relevant criticism is that your music had a retro feel, that you were sounding too much like your heroes.
A–I have been accused of being retro and there is some validity to that, but I think each album has been less retro than the one before it. I like my influences and they were important as far as rock ‘n’ roll is concerned. But country music was the backbone of my creative upbringing–old country music like Hank Williams, the Louvin Brothers, Johnny Cash–and it’s become more valuable to me lately, with the directness of the lyrics and the structure of the songs. I think there are lots of folk and country influences on all three albums, and you can hear it especially lately in things like the harmonies on “The Difficult Kind” or the Appalachian feel of “Riverwide.”
Q–You’ve produced your last couple of albums and you’re now producing an album for Stevie Nicks. Do you see yourself expanding that role?
A–I would, but I find that my frustration with producing other people is that I’d rather be working on my own stuff. The creative process in the studio is so immediate. I like to pick up an instrument and start playing, so if I’m working on one song and we wind up going down another path, that’s when the magic happens. That’s how “Riverwide” came out–I got frustrated and detuned my guitar and out came this song. And you don’t have that freedom when you’re working with someone else, unless they’re willing to let you write their material. I’m enjoying working with Stevie, but I’m looking forward to making my own record so I can set up my own sandbox to play in.
