Artist. Activist. Grammy winner. Superstar. Cancer survivor… As she airs her most socially charged songs yet on twelfth album Evolution, she looks back on the battles, triumphs, hardships, hopes and achievements that mark out her winding road.
It’s difficult to believe we’ve had the pleasure of Sheryl Crow’s company for three decades now – not least to the singer-songwriter herself. “I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know if anybody ever really feels their age,” she considers. “I mean, I’m sixty-two and I need to get my lips done, I need to get a little facelift. But unless I’m looking in a mirror, mentally I feel like I’m about thirty-six.”
Talking in the music room of her home in rural Nashville, sitting in front of a rack of vintage acoustic guitars befitting the queen of heartland roots rock, Crow is everything we need right now from our rock stars. Witty, articulate, informed and inquisitive, she is nobody’s vacuous pin-up. She has opinions: on gun control, climate change, military conflict, the Presidential election, the insidious rise of AI and what it might mean for her two teenage sons. Ask her and she’ll talk about all of it (the only subjects we’re told are off the table today are her shift in the 80s singing backing vocals for Michael Jackson’s Bad tour, and her much raked-over split from disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong). That readiness to stand up and be counted came from her formative years, she says, still talking with a Midwest drawl.
Sheryl Crow was born on February 11, 1962 in Kennett, the largest city of the so-called Missouri Bootheel. A classic overachieving middle child, her prolific contribution to life at Kennett High School saw her compete as an all-state track athlete and join the National Honor Society. But it was the combination of her parents’ politics and her musical talents that set her path.
Your biog makes you sound like the dream teenager – sporty, clever, popular…
Oh, I was perfect [laughs]. No, I was a people pleaser. I think I wanted my parents to really like me. It was all about making good grades, being in student council and the Honor Society. I felt like love was attached to being good, being smart, being liked. Years of therapy had to un-ingrain [the idea] that love is not attached to anything. That everybody deserves to be loved, whether or not you get Fs in school and smoke weed. That love is not something you earn. And I don’t fault my parents for that. I took on that persona and I ran with it until I was famous. At a certain point, you realise: “Wait a minute, I can stand up here in front of a hundred and eighty thousand people at a festival and walk away not feeling loved. What’s wrong with me? Do I not feel like I’m deserving?”
