After selling tens of millions of records worldwide and headlining tours around the globe, singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow says she's finally aged out of pop music — and she's OK with that.
"There's great liberation in being able to just write whatever I want and not be thinking, 'Is this going to get played on radio? Is it going to be as big as my last hit?'" Crow says.
Now in her 60s, Crow lives and works in Nashville. She describes her latest studio album, Pick You Up, as "me at my age, as a mom, asking the same questions that I think a lot of us are asking about who we are at this moment in our humanity [and] what do we stand for."
If that sounds morose or depressing, Crow says the album is neither: "It's very hopeful. But there's a lot of questions on it about where we're at right now and what kind of world we're leaving our kids."
For Crow, music has been "a lifesaver" — but also a source of pressure. She has been in the public eye through cancer and breakups, and has spoken openly about living with depression. But, she says, she's also learned to use music as a "salve and a system of relief."
"My band and I are always laughing. Every time we go out onstage, we feel like we're getting away with something," she says. "We can't believe we're still getting to do this … and to get to play songs that people are singing back to us is a dream of dreams."
Interview highlights
On landing a job as a backup singer for Michael Jackson's 1987 world tour
I'd been [in LA] about six or eight months and didn't have a passport. The next thing I know, we're rehearsing, and a month later, we're in Tokyo playing for 65,000 people. …
I think I'd only been on one or two airplanes in my whole life. So every single thing about it was new. … Going all over Japan, all over Australia, coming home for a little bit, doing a run, and then going to Europe, and then also compound that with rehearsing with a top-notch band. It was a crash course in [the] music industry, for sure — how records get made, how records get on the charts. There were so many things about it that were new to me. And when I came home from the tour, I felt like I had lived in LA and worked for 30 years.
On her early experiences with sexual harassment in the industry
I was raised in a very close-knit family. My dad was a small-town attorney with big cases that were steeped in civil rights. … He was like an Atticus Finch kind of guy, loved books. My mom [was] an incredible singer, and they raised us with this ideology of, like, work really hard and be a good person and things will work out for you, right? So when I went on that tour, I was exposed to a lot of things that I do think sort of robbed me of my innocence about how everything works.
I came home from that tour, [and] first I visited an attorney to help me — like, what do I do? And this attorney said, by the end of the meeting, "Sometimes you have to put up with a certain amount of things in order to have the kind of success that you want." … I came away from it a different person. But I also came away from it the same person, but stronger.
On asking Bob Dylan for advice on writer's block
There was one point, I think it was the late '90s, I was going through a really hard moment where I could not finish anything. I could have all these great ideas, and then I just couldn't finish them. And I had read that Bob had had a really long bout of writer's block. He had told me, "Anytime you have any problems or you just wanna pick my brain about anything, call me." ...
We don't really know where music comes from, you know? But just like all art, if we get out of our own way, sometimes we get something.
So I called Bob and … I said, "Hey, I'm having writer's block. And I understand you had writer's blocks at one point." And he's like, "Nope, never did." He said, "Well, how long has it been since you finished a song?" I said, "God, I feel like I've been struggling for, like, eight months." "Ooh, that's bad." But he told me, "Get your band together and play, like, an old Muddy Waters song. ... Just jam on it for a while and then start writing your own lyrics over it. And the next thing you know, you have a song." Little things throughout my life … have really seriously formed moments that came after them, like getting my band together and jamming on something and finding my way through it. So he has been instrumental in a lot of the big moments of my life.
On the mental health struggles and exhaustion that led to being hospitalized earlier in her career
I was really tired because … we were really playing five or six nights a week. Like, we'd play three nights, day off, four nights, three nights. I think if you're a person who already struggles with mental instability or whatever, becoming that fatigued and also losing your perspective can be detrimental to your mental health. And I remember calling Scooter [Weintraub], my manager, and just saying, "I'm in Boston. I don't want to keep going. I don't know what to do, where to go." And so he came, picked me up. We went to New York, and I went to Mount Sinai and got help. I was just not able to figure out the difference between what it meant to feel alive and OK, and what it meant to feel like you didn't wanna be alive and OK. And that was a turning point.
On writing the 2002 song "Weather Channel" about that experience
I went into the studio and I said, "I have a song I want to sing." And I sang it, playing the guitar and singing it live on the mic, all one take. And I actually did not remember it at all. So when we were mixing, [the producer was] like, "What about the song 'Weather Channel?'" I had absolutely no recollection of it. And when she played it for me, I burst into tears. They had me on a medication … which evidently can mess with your short-term memory. So we wound up finishing it, put a little bit of strings on it, and put it on record. …
That is one of the things about music that I find to be mystical and divine, is that sometimes we don't really know where music comes from, you know? But just like all art, if we get out of our own way, sometimes we get something.
Therese Madden and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Daoud Tyler-Ameen adapted it for the web.
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