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Dates Appearing: August 12, 13 Current Release: Sheryl Crow |
A couple of years ago, Sheryl Crow was invited to open a series of shows for Bob Dylan at Roseland ballroom in New York. At the time, her debut album for A&M, TUESDAY NIGHT MUSIC CLUB, was beginning to seriously sleam up the charts, and the response from audiences at her recent shows reflected that excitement. Before the Roseland gigs commenced, though, she was tipped off that opening for Dylan might be a little different.
"People would warn me that Dylan's audiences are there to see Bob and they can't wait to get you off the stage," Crow remembers. "That they'll even bring paperback books with them. I kind of laughed and thought. Well, you know...that's an exaggeration. But the first night, I looked out and people were there with paperback books, newspapers, thumbing through their purses... lt'really unnerved me."
The next night, Crow began the guitar intro to one of her songs and discovered that her instrument wasn't turned on. It turned out to be a blessing. "It broke the ice," she observes. "I made jokes about it and it became a whole different audience. That was a good lesson - they just want to know that you're real."
On her new a]bum, titled SHERYL CROW, she's written the songs, produced the recording sessions, played a lot of the instruments, and sings about what's been passing across her field of vision the last few years - subjects ranging from the crossdresser at her local coffee shop to the carnage in Bosnia. She does it with the assurance of a veteran musician and songwriter, and the unvarnished emotions of a gal from Missouri who's grateful for her success but isn't about to let it shadow what she wants or how she'll say it. The result isn't a record that's always happy or smooth or simple to decipher. But it's Sheryl Crow's record. And it's emphatically real.
"I went into it with a gambit of experiences from the last two or three years, and also quite a bit of raw emotion," she says. "I wanted people to know that right now, while I'm making this record, that this is how I feel. Later you move out of the moment and you make another record and it'll be something else."
"I have a philosophy that everything you write doesn't have to be good for everybody. There are going to be people that get irritated by some of the things I write - including my parents. And then there are going to be people that you draw in because of the abrasiveness or the pointedness of certain things. I think as I get older, everything becomes a little more acute, a little more intense. I really want to get down to the bottom of it, you know? Get into the thick of it and avoid the surface-y bulishit."
She got into the thick of making SHERYL CROW even more quickly than she intended. To avoid the distractions of everyday life in her adopted home town of Los Angeles, she'd opted to record at Daniel Lanois's Kingsway Studio in New Orleans with producer Bill Bottrell, continuing the partnership which had proven so successful on TUESDAY NIGHT MUSIC CLUB. But after one night at Kigsway, Bottrell opted out of the project, for reasons Crow still isn't sure she understands.
"You know, everything that goes along with creativity is not cut and dried." she says philosophically. "I couldn't really say why, except there was definitely a vibe in that house," she adds. "But something just didn't happen. So on day two I said, 'Ok, I'm going to gather my wits and figure out how to pull this whole thing together.' That's where it all began. And I think a lot of that shows up on this record - a lot of that un-pretty, in-your-face, sometimes unpleasant, vulnerable emotion.
"I was lucky to find a female-engineer," she says of Trina Shoemaker. "We sort of fell into each other in New Orleans and we were on the same page. Together we sort of, 'I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar'," she laughs.
Crow also took on a considerable portion of the instrumental duties during the sessions. She played some acoustic and electric guitar, and the bass and all the keyboard parts - including a heavy lean on the Hammond B-3 organ, which Crow calls "my instrunent of choice since I was 15. It's very tribal and very animal, the way you make a Hammond growl," she enthuses. "It purrs, it whines - it's undeniably the sexiest instrument ever."
New Orleans, Kingsway Studios in particular, gets atmosphere credits for helping along Sheryl Crow's swampy, spooky vibe. "I grew up very close to Memphis, so a lot of my influences were from that area. And as everyone knows, New Orleans can really kick you in the ass. It's vibrant, really alive - and dangerous, too. Kingsway is this huge mansion right on the edge of the French Quarter, and has a long history of ghosts. It's full of weird undercurrents. I had an idea in mind that I wanted to make a record that had sort of the intimacy, spiritual and rural qualities of, say, a Robert Johnson record, but almost Bobby Gentry-ish, too, if you can remember her. And throwing it all in the pot and coming up with something that relates to now."
It's a sonic blueprint flexible enough to encompass the lonesome prairie twang of the balled "Home," the delirious pop choruses of "If It Makes You Happy" and "Everyday is a Winding Road," the classic Stones riffs of "Hard to Make a Stand" and the quietly brooding ambiance of "The Book." Part of the thrill of charting her own course, Crow suggests, was the chance to expand her range and maybe even develop some new muscles on the way, while putting across the results in a way that lets the listeners feel the burn.
"I've always felt the need to express whatever discomforts I have," she says. "I think that's the biggest part of why some people become performers. I think songwriting is a bit like athletics - if you keep at it, you're bound to get better. But what makes a great song, I think, sometimes has to do with your ability to live life and acknowledge what's going on around you. I write sometimes narratively and sometimes literally, but I believe in every song I've written."
She's reluctant to plumb too deeply into the meaning of her own songs, though: "The fun is not knowing exactly what's going to come out. Your subconscious does play itself out, whether you re ready to deal with it or not. That's exciting to me, because I already know how to write a song - how to craft a song. But the ones that are really special are the ones that don't always come from that 'I know how to write a song' place."
One song fitting that description was "Redemption Day." which she wrote after returning from entertaining U.S. military troops stationed in Bosnia. (Her trip there was chronicled on a VH-l documentary, "A Postcard From Bosnia," which has been nominated for the Columbia DuPont award). Afterwards, though she'd pretty much completed work on the record, "The transformation I was feeling from having been there made me feel like writing furiously, like a crazy person. What came out of it was a political song, and a song that wasn't even in my own writing style."
The experience of providing a little cheer in such a bleak place, however, helped put her other journey-from Sheryl Crow, player in the band, to Sheryl Crow, pop-star-in healthier perspective. "When I got home I felt very revitalized to remember that this was why I got into music. You realize what it is that makes music the great healing power that it is."
A month after sharing that bill with Bob Dylan at Roseland, Crow remembers, she found herself on the stage at Woodstock II, playing before an audience of 300,000. "And the day after that," she says, "We played the 9:30 club in Washington D.C., which is a tiny hole with a capacity of about a hundred. There were rats everywhere. We loaded in our own gear and watched rats run through the rafters."
"We had a good audience that night. But I thought, 'boy, you can't ever get too big for your britches,"' she laughs. "'Because this is really where your going to land.'"
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