But the conversation veers toward shaky ground. She’s reflecting on her past success, on the string of events that included a ubiquitous hit single (“All I Wanna Do”), maximum video rotation, endless interviews, an “MTV Unplugged” and three Grammy Awards, including Best New Artist. “I was really, by the end of it, very overexposed,” she says. “I’ve said that it’s really great for other female artists to look at me and know what not to do. Part of it was my own fault. I’m an accessible person. I’m willing to do whatever. Not for the fame, but I just kind of went along with it.” Then she slips up. “I don’t want to sound like George Michael. I’m not at all happy with the success I’ve had.”
Whoops–she probably meant to say unhappy. Or did she? For someone who seems to have it all together, Crow has made a pretty convincing album about falling apart. “Sheryl Crow” is nervy and unsettling, a psychojourney through a very deep funk; it’s definitely not a happy record. Like her first album, the new one compiles styles from rock and blues to country and soul, but this time the references are mangled by studio effects, heavy distortion and oddball instrumentation. Crow’s lyrics tell fractured tales of losers, misfits and star-crossed loners who are just determined to make their lives go wrong. “I didn’t want it to be a beautiful record,” Crow says. “I didn’t want it to be sonically pleasing. I wanted it to be kind of abrasive, and kind of bratty. I wanted it to sound like how I was feeling, and that was raw.”
“Sheryl Crow” has already startled a few people out of their expectations. “Love Is a Good Thing” contains the lines “Watch our children while they kill each other/With a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores,” and Wal-Mart has refused to stock the album. “We feel it would be a slap at our associates who for years have committed themselves to helping children,” says Dale Ingram, a Wal-Mart spokesman. “And we don’t sell guns to kids.” Crow’s refusal to change the lyric could cost her half a million in sales. Her strong stands have led to other struggles. On the second day of recording, her producer Bill Bottrell, who’d been instrumental in the making of “Tuesday Night Music Club,” walked off the job. “I was stunned,” she says. “It was a total bombshell. But he and I always had the battle of who the artist was, and I just wasn’t going to have it this time.” Crow wound up producing the album herself, and the work shows up in the self-confidence of the vocals. “I guess nobody has a better vision of who you are than yourself,” she says. “Bill has a real aversion to people who can sing professionally. I know I’m a better singer than my last album, but my last album was what it was.”
Crow’s been trying to prove for a long time that she has substance as well as style. She grew up in Kennett, Mo., a small farming town near Memphis: “There’s nowhere in my hometown to buy records except Wal-Mart.” She earned a degree in piano and voice from the University of Missouri, and taught music for two years before heading to L.A. Her first professional gig was singing backup for Michael Jackson on his “Bad” world tour; subsequent backup gigs included Don Henley and Rod Stewart. “Tuesday Night Music Club” was a collaborative effort that grew out of informal jams with musician friends in L.A. All this was great experience, but her schlocky pop background raised credibility issues when she became famous as a roots rocker. “Millions of listeners seem willing to believe Crow’s current incarnation,” wrote Jon Pareles in The New York Times after her 1995 Grammys. “But none of them, this one included, know yet who she is.”
Crow was there all the time. Both “Tuesday Night Music Club” and the new album contain grand American themes of restlessness, ambition and discontent; from her first hit, “Leaving Las Vegas,” to the new “Hard to Make a Stand,” Crow writes about the compulsive desire to move from place to place from an idiosyncratic female perspective. What she’s trying to do is build a career around her music instead of hype and fashion. “At the end of the day, I can play a Bob Dylan song and it will be a great song,” she says. “I hope that 25 years from now some young artist might play one of my songs and it might be a revelation in some way.” It’s a high goal, but she’s working hard at it.
