Sheryl Crow knows a great song when she hears it, or writes it. And lately she’s been hearing so many good ones from the younger generation of female singers and songwriters that she’s got serious FOMO.
“The caliber of writing is just so good with Chappell Roan, Olivia and Phoebe Bridgers, and these women are not just in the studio throwing in a lyric — they play,” she told Variety magazine. “If you want to take a course in great songwriting, go study at the college of Taylor Swift. There’s Brandi [Carlile] and Courtney Barnett. For a long time, there was a dearth of women who were playing and singing and rocking, and now I’m tickled.”
Some she got to see work their magic up close at the recent session at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium to tape an all-star network special honoring Ringo Starr’s country album, Look Up. Crow said she was dumbstruck “being onstage with Molly Tuttle, Sarah Jarosz and Larkin Poe. I remember having a conversation with people on the Grammys board 15 years ago, saying, ’What are you guys going to do to get instruments into young women’s hands?’ Lo and behold, some of the greatest musicianship right now is young and female.”
More than three decades into a career that was kicked into overdrive by her 1994 Tuesday Night Music Club hit “All I Wanna Do,” Crow is also sanguine about her place in the music business these days. “I feel happy. I feel at peace. There isn’t that ’Oh my God, I gotta write a hit song.’ Even if I wrote a hit song, it wouldn’t get played!” she said. “So now I just wanna write music that feels like I’m glad I wrote it.”
The mother of two teenage boys hasn’t toured much lately — she did open some dates for P!nk last year — and while she’ll hit the road for a limited run of shows with Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan for their Outlaw Music Festival this summer, she would have “done every single one” if her kids wanted to join her on the road. “I’m too selfish to want to miss any time with them; I feel like my 18-year-old was just born, and he’s gonna be leaving for college in a year,” she said, promising that once both boys are out of the house she’ll “go back to work full time, because I have an acute connection to joy when I’m playing.”
And though she’s lived in Nashville for more than two decades, proud progressive Crow said she’s well aware that her habit of tweaking conservatives doesn’t always make her popular in the city that’s a blue dot in an otherwise deep red state that overwhelmingly went for Donald Trump in all three of the presidential elections he’s participated in.
So the singer who famously announced in February — long before the current spate of protests, sell-backs and arson attacks — that she was selling her Tesla and donating the proceeds to NPR is finding her own way to quiet the red noise around her. “Tennessee is a hard place for me. I mean, I struggle,” she said. “I call my representatives [in Congress] every single morning — Andy Ogles and Marsha Blackburn hear from me every day — because we have to stand up and be vocal and fight for the future for our kids.”
Asked what she imagines her reps think when they get a fresh voicemail from the Grammy-winner every single work day, Crow said, “I do think, ’Are they laughing?’ But it’s like what Jimmy Carter said: ‘As long as there’s legal bribery, we won’t ever have fair elections.’ So we have to keep raising our voices and showing up to these organized rallies.”
She also noted that unlike the flak she got back in 1996 when Walmart banned her self-titled album because of the lyric “Watch out sister/ Watch out brother/ Watch our children as they kill each other/ With a gun they bought at the Walmart discount stores” on the song “Love Is a Good Thing,” back then she didn’t live in Tennessee, “where everybody is armed.”
So, yes, “there was a moment where I actually really felt very afraid,” she said of a scary incident that occurred after she announced her Tesla sell-off. “A man got on my property, in my barn, who was armed. It doesn’t feel safe when you’re dealing with people who are so committed,” she revealed.
Given what she knows now, would Crow post that kind of video again? “I can’t help it,” she told the magazine. “I feel like I’m fighting for my kids. Also, that’s the way I was raised. There have been times when it hasn’t really been fun, but I follow my [To Kill a Mockingbird lead character] Atticus Finch dad [attorney Wendell Wyatt Crow]; I’m very similar to him if I see something that seems unfair, you know?”
