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CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
With a new album, a fresh tour, and her first son,
SHERYL CROW’s
life is in the fast lane.
BY JAMES MAYFIELD
PHOTOGRAPHY BY NORMAN JEAN ROY
Catching up with Sheryl Crow these days is no easy task. In a two-week period, she appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Ellen Degeneres Show, Last Call with Carson Daly, MSN’s Control Room, and Jimmy Kimmel Live! “I’ve never talked about myself so much in my life,” she says, speaking from yet another stop in Toronto, Canada. It’s not surprising that she is in such demand. With all of the events going on in the 46-year-old artist’s life right now, there’s a lot to talk about.
On one hand, she has released her best album in years. Her sixth studio album, Detours, debuted at No. 2 when it came out in February. There’s also the new main man in her life, her 11-month-old son Wyatt. “He’s the first thing I think of in the morning and the last thing I think of at night,” she proudly declares. “Every decision I make is informed by him being in my life. It’s just the most joyful experience … I’m so happy that he’s in my life.”
HER FAVORITE ESCAPE
Amid the busy promotional and personal schedule, there is one place where Crow can go to slow down. It’s also the place her mind goes first when she thinks about vacationing and where she wrote the majority of the songs on Detours — her 150-acre farm outside of Nashville. With rolling hills, horses and cows, and wide-open spaces, her move from L.A. to the country has proven both a calming, as well as creative, transition to what Crow calls the simple life. “The simple life for me means a life that is devoid of meaningless distractions. We have to really practice at not being distracted, because being distracted is pain free. But I love the fact that I can walk out in the morning with my son and go hang out with the horses. We’re planting a garden and he’s going to grow up knowing what it’s like to really revere the earth and to appreciate the environment.”
THE ROAD TO THE RECORD
There are pivotal moments in everyone’s life when you reflect on where you’ve been, what you’ve accomplished, and where you’re going. That moment for Crow came in 2006 when she was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer. The title for her latest record is a reflection of this experience. “I just thought the idea of [Detours] was interesting because no matter how much we think we control all the events of our lives, so often we realize that we’re off on a journey that’s taken us so far away from who we know ourselves to be and it dictates that we come back and remember who we are. And for me personally, I think breast cancer was that awakening moment where I really had to address who I’d become and what my life was and what I wanted it to look like.” Crow has been cancer free now for two years and, as she puts it, celebrates that every day.
Like a lot of singer-songwriters, music has always served as a therapeutic way for Crow to express her feelings about what she’s going through in life. Songs like “my Favorite mistake,” “Everyday Is a Winding Road,” “If It makes You Happy,” and “Strong Enough,” all mark different moments in her life. And on Detours, she gets more personal than ever. Tackling such topics as love lost (“Detours”), the future (“Gasoline”), loving from afar (“Drunk with the Thought of You”), her battle with cancer (“make It Go Away: Radiation Song”), and the love for her son (“Lullaby for Wyatt”), Detours reads like a road map of the past few years of Crow’s life.
“Most of the songs I wrote by myself and they came together in the early, early hours of the morning,” she says, describing her songwriting process. “Wyatt would wake up for his second or third feeding about 4 a.m. I would get up and when he would go back to sleep, I would just stay up and write in the quiet hours. It made for a very quick process in that I had all of this stuff that I wanted to write about and all of these themes kind of right on the surface.”
Another factor Crow credits with the success and quality material of the new record is producer and longtime friend Bill Bottrell. The pair first bottled magic on Crow’s debut album, 1993’s Tuesday Night Music Club, which went on to win the first Grammy awards of her career that to date total nine. This time around, they hunkered down in Crow’s Nashville home studio for 40 days and emerged with 24 songs, 14 of which appear on the new record. “It was a really creative and prolific time,” Crow says. “And a wonderful homecoming in that over the course of 14 years we hadn’t worked together. We’d seen each other at the Grammys probably five or six years ago and said we’ve got to work together. But I was still intent on producing myself. On this record, I was intent on not producing myself. And he kept coming to mind. The two of us had gone on our own separate journeys over the last few years that had really changed the way our lives were going to be. So when we came back together, I think we’d really evolved as people and as artists.”
THE EARLY YEARS
Sheryl Suzanne Crow was born to play music. Growing up in Kennett, Missouri, her father, Wendell, was a trumpet player and mother, Bernice, played piano. That said, they weren’t the sit-around-the-dinner-table-and-jam type of family. According to Crow, “my mom was a piano teacher, although she didn’t teach us. All of us kids [Sheryl has two sisters and a brother] started piano around the age of 5 or 6. But we weren’t a family that sat around playing Christmas carols and all that. Of course we kids thought we were way too cool to do anything quite so corny. But now as we’ve gotten older, that’s what we do.”
It was in one of Crow’s early bands, Cashmere, during her college days at the University of Missouri, that she discovered she could actually be the lead singer and front a band. “We played at a place called Bullwinkle’s covering songs by Heart, Quarterflash, Huey Lewis and the News, and Pat Benatar,” she says. “I wasn’t the lead singer until the lead singer quit. But when I became the lead singer, that’s when I really learned to sing on mic.”
Her early ensemble also helped her hone the chops that would come in handy later in life when she was first getting acclimated to the music scene out in L.A. “It was a great, great tradition when I was growing up that you’d be in a pick-up band, which was a huge pool of musicians who knew the standards, Motown, Stax, Beatles, all that,” she says. “I think that’s one of the things missing from music — you don’t have that ability anymore to just have musicians get together and jam like they used to in the 1960s. It’s a bummer that all kids, all musicians, don’t get to grow up doing that because you just build this incredible dictionary of songs that you can go and play with other musicians. That old tradition doesn’t really exist anymore. Nobody knows the same music.”
And now, she’s passing the musical torch down to Wyatt, who she says is already showing an affection for music. “He would sit, even as a four-month-old, in the control room and Bill would be holding him and he’d just be fascinated by all of the lights on the control board and console. He does this funny bop thing when we say ‘dancin, dancin.’”
AROUND THE BEND
So what does the future hold for Crow? Professionally, she’s always wanted to do a country record. “I would love to. I think Bill and I are going to get back together and address those songs that got left off and see where we go from there.” And there is a rumor of a Fleetwood Mac collaboration, of which she won’t say much except that she loves the band, and especially pal Stevie Nicks, calling a future collaboration “a dream that we’ll continue to talk about doing.”
She’ll also continue to work with various charities that she supports. “I do a lot of work for Stop Global Warming as well as the NRDC (National resources Defense Council). And then I also do a lot of work for the World Food Program, which feeds kids in Third World countries. I do a lot of work for cancer as well.”
“But,” she concludes, “I’m trying really to not make plans. Just sort of be where I am and not be thinking about the future and let somebody else do that.”
HERE AND NOW
While the summer may mean vacations and relaxation to a lot of people, for a musician like Crow, it means touring. A lot. When she takes her show on the road this season for a series of live dates (see sidebar for tour dates and locations), she’ll be doing something she hasn’t done before: performing some of her songs without playing an instrument. Interestingly, during her 15-plus-year solo career, she’s always been accompanied by at least an acoustic guitar, bass, even an accordion. “This year is different. I got a bass player for the first time and it’s really changed things,” she says of the road show. “It’s opened up the show in that I’m kind of out there out front. It’s very, very odd. I feel like I’ve stepped right out of the June Taylor Dancers. It’s like, what am I doing out here? What am I supposed to do with these appendages? I should get a high-priced choreographer. But the album, it kind of cries out for that kind of proselytizing. You know it’s made it, obviously, much more dramatic, but it’s kind of fun to be able to just relate to the audience without a prop. And I’ve never had the luxury of doing that. Never even chosen to have the luxury of doing that. It’s always been imperative for me that I be a musician’s musician.”
 This summer’s tour will not only be different in the show sense, but behind the scenes as well with Wyatt in tow. In the past, Crow has been known to take dirt bikes along on tour, or yoga instructors for two-hour sessions with the crew. This year will be the polar opposite. Though she still likes to go for a run after sound check every night, she says she’s a “kinder, gentler version” of herself now. “I think my hobby might be sleeping on this tour,” she says. And what will be on board the bus for Wyatt? “There is a book that is the book. It’s called Goodnight Gorilla. I imagine that we’ll have a couple of versions of that just in case one gets lost.”
Wyatt has already become a well-seasoned traveler. “He’s been everywhere and he’s got more frequent flier miles than any baby I know. He’s been to Italy and to France and we’re in Canada right now. And he’s been to London already and to Germany. He’s a great little traveler, very social … wants to meet everybody in the airplane.” Such is the life when you have a rock star mom.
MUSICAL NOTES
A TIMELINE OF SHERYL CROW’S RELEASES AND GRAMMY AWARDS
1993: TUESDAY NIGHT MUSIC CLUB
(Record of the Year for “All I Wanna Do”; Best New Artist; Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for “All I Wanna Do”)
1996: SHERYL CROW
(Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for “If It Makes You happy”; Best Rock Album)
1998: THE GLOBE SESSIONS
(Best Female Rock Vocal
Performance for “There Goes the Neighborhood”; Best Female Rock Vocal
Performance for “Sweet Child o’ Mine”; Best Rock Album)
2002: C’MON C’MON
(Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for “Steve McQueen”)
2003: THE VERY BEST OF SHERYL CROW
2005: WILDFLOWER
2008: DETOURS
CATCH HER IF YOU CAN
(UPCOMING TOUR DATES)
MAY
22 St Louis, MO
23 Pelham, AL
24 Elizabeth, IN
25 Cincinnati, OH
26 Toronto, Ontario
28 Columbia, MD
29 New York, NY
30 Atlantic City, NJ
JUNE
2 Indianapolis, IN
3 Moline, IL
4 Madison, WI
5 Kansas City, MO
9 Denver, CO
11 Los Angeles, CA
13 Murphys, CA
24 Paris, France
25 Paris, France
27 Glasgow, Scotland
28 Hyde Park, London
29 The Hague, Netherlands
JULY
1 Hamburg, Germany
3 Copenhagen, Denmark
6 Lucca, Italy
7 Savona, Italy
| JULY
24 Nashville, TN
26 Uncasville, CT
28 Wantagh, NY
29 Holmdel, NJ
30 Mansfield, MA
31 Sarasota Springs, NY
AUGUST
2 Philadelphia, PA
3 Canandiagua, NY
5 Detroit, MI
6 Green Bay, WI
8 Milwaukee, WI
9 Minneapolis, MN
10 Highland Park, IL
14 Houston, TX
15 Dallas, TX
16 Oklahoma City, OK
18 Albuquerque, NM
19 Tucson, AZ
21 San Diego, CA
22 Las Vegas, NV
23 Lake Tahoe, NV
25 Salt lake City, UT
27 Concord, CA
29 Portland, OR
30 Seattle, WA
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Check out www.sherylcrow.com for more updates.
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