“I was a kid who dreamed rock and roll, who pored over album covers,” Sheryl Crow said during her 2023 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction acceptance speech in November. “I knew every name of every musician on every album cover, and I found my identity in the lyrics from the songs that I’m sure were written for me. … Music is a universal gift that we all share.”
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For more than 30 years, Crow has shared her timeless songs with the masses. Her 1993 debut, Tuesday Night Music Club, introduced her as a songwriting force and a captivating artist. The feel-good “All I Wanna Do” and introspective “Strong Enough” sat alongside darker numbers on the project like “What I Can Do for You,” which details sexual harassment the singer faced in the music industry. Crow credits her then-producer Bill Bottrell for encouraging her to write the confessional tune.
It was this honesty and vulnerability that inspired a generation of women to follow in her footsteps. One of those women is Olivia Rodrigo, who performed “If It Makes You Happy” with the singer at Crow’s induction.
“Sheryl is a total force of nature that broke down so many doors for women in the music industry,” Rodrigo tells American Songwriter. “Her incredible hooks and brilliant lyrics inspire me and I’m sure many generations to come.”
Throughout her career, Crow never shied away from the truth. Songs like “Love Is a Good Thing,” which criticized Walmart for selling guns, resulted in the retail chain refusing to sell the singer’s 1996 self-titled album in its stores.
Watch out sister, watch out brother
Watch our children while they kill each other
With a gun they bought at Walmart discount stores
—“Love Is a Good Thing”
Despite the obvious setback at the time, Crow’s first nine studio albums have since sold 35 million copies worldwide. For the nine-time Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter, there was no other option than to tell the truth in her music.
“Music is a safer place for me to write because you’re not really thinking about who it’s going to affect or what the outcome is going to be because it’s so personal,” Crow tells American Songwriter. “I’ve written songs like that where I didn’t really think about the repercussions of it and I’ve been dealt some repercussions. I wrote about the Walmart thing with people going in and being able to buy ‘cop-killer’ bullets.
“Telling the truth feels instinctual,” she continues. “Especially if you’ve grown up listening to people who write lyrics that are truthful, then you think, ‘Well, that’s part of my job description.’ You don’t think about it until you have to defend it. I wouldn’t change anything. I do feel like any story that I have, any experience that I have, 99 percent of the people around me have had it or 99 percent of the women in the world have experienced this in one way or another.”
Crow adds that finishing a song for her often feels like she’s told the whole story.
“It’s almost like doing a deposition: I told the truth. I can’t be sent to jail for perjuring myself,” she adds. “Then, once it goes out, you let go of it and wish it well and hope that the alarm on your house works.”
Crow learned truth-telling from her heroes. Her earliest musical memories include studying records by James Taylor, Carole King, Elton John, Linda Ronstadt, and Bonnie Raitt. Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and The Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed and Exile on Main St. were formative albums for the young singer/songwriter. Even today, before she goes into a studio to record a new album, Crow brings lyric books by Dylan and Leonard Cohen for inspiration.
“All of that music marked my life,” she says. “My earliest memories of music were my parents. They were and still are very musical. … My parents played in an amateur swing band. They came home and they played records all the time.
“I grew up laying on the floor next to the record player poring over albums,” she recalls. “I grew up when music was a thing you held and you also paid for it and you shared it with all your friends and it was such a communal experience.”
Crow admits that with the phone “being our 11th appendage” she doesn’t know if people today feel the evolution of their personality through music like she did.
“For me, my personality was really formed socially through music,” she explains. “We cruised up and down Main Street and what we heard marked our summers. It’s such a physical experience. Now when I hear those songs—like when I hear Supertramp or when I hear the Eagles—I know exactly where I was. I know exactly who I was with and what we were doing, and I hope people still have that experience.”
The Kennett, Missouri, native wrote her first song at 13 and entered a competition for the best song for her home state. While she doesn’t remember the title, the track did get an honorable mention. Crow went on to study music at the University of Missouri, where she received a degree in classical piano and a Bachelor of Arts in teaching.
While her parents urged her to get her degree so she had something to fall back on, for Crow, music was always ingrained in her.
“I was the most familiar with myself when I was singing or writing, or even [playing] other people’s material,” she explains. “I was in cover bands. I learned how to sing and how to write by learning other people’s material.
“I’ve done a lot of songwriting talks with kids and I always say cover bands are incredible,” she says. “When I was growing up, you learned the pop songbook, you learned all of Motown, all of Stax, you learned what was on the radio, and that, by osmosis, I think teaches you about crafting. If you can learn crafting and you have the artist side of you that is broken but also fearless and feels the urgency to express, then you’ve got that perfect combination.”
Crow knows firsthand, as she was a music teacher in the Saint Louis School System. She spent two years as a teacher in the Rockwood School District before she decided to move to Los Angeles. Six months before she moved to California, Crow served as a session player and performed countless gigs. One of those sessions was for McDonald’s. The commercial aired regionally through Chicago and then got picked up nationwide. “I made more money in 45 minutes than I had in two years of teaching school,” she says.
By 26, Crow was on the road with Michael Jackson as a backup singer and wrote songs on the side. Several of her early cuts, which were on a scrapped first album, were recorded by Tina Turner (“All Kinds of People”), Celine Dion (“Love You Blind”), and Wynonna Judd (“Father Sun”). Phil Collins and Eric Clapton also placed songs of hers on hold. But some sage advice from Don Henley soon set Crow on a different career path.
“When I met Don, and I played him some of my material, he was like, ‘You need to hang on to your best work and take that work and make that be your signature,’” she recalls. “Having somebody of that stature believe in me made a big difference. Then he took me on the road with him and I continued to work on my own music. It was the first time I had somebody say, ‘You’re not just good as a songwriter, you’re good for you.’ That changed the way I looked at my artistry.”
Crow took Henley’s advice to heart, and by 28 she signed a record deal with A&M. She’d go on to release her debut album five months shy of her 30th birthday.
It was around this time that Crow says she found her voice as a songwriter. “I Shall Believe,” the last song on Tuesday Night Music Club, which she wrote with Bottrell, marked a turning point for her as a songwriter. The stripped-down ballad shares her vulnerabilities with the listener.
And I do believe
That not everything is gonna be the way
You think it ought to be
It seems like every time I try to make it right
It all comes down on me
Please say honestly
You won’t give up on me
And I shall believe
—“I Shall Believe”
“I just laid everything bare,” she says. “That felt like, ‘Okay, I’m really revealing at this moment the two legs that I stand on, and what my pathos is and who I am.’ It wasn’t perfect and that was even more on point.”
Crow says as she’s gotten older she’s appreciated being more honest in her songwriting.
“I really love the writing process,” she adds. “I love those uncomfortable nooks and crannies. I like saying what people are thinking and don’t want to say. I think I’m more inspired to write now than I have ever been and I think part of that is having traveled through a full life. I had a full life before I was ever given a record deal. I was 28 when I got my record deal. I had had jobs. I had been fired. I had waited tables all over. I had been engaged. There was a lot of living that happened before I made it and then it really picked up speed when I did make it.
“Now that I’m on the other side of all of the journeying from real-life stuff and also having cancer to adopting my boys, I feel like now the floodgates of heart and soul are open,” she continues. “As much as I hate the aging and how that sort of cancels you or disqualifies you, there is some freedom in that and in being able to not care.”
This freedom can be heard within the nine tracks on Crow’s forthcoming album, Evolution, available March 29. The songs tackle a wide range of topics, including artificial intelligence, nature, and divinity. Crow describes the new batch of songs as being inspired “less of ego and more of divinity.”
Where are we headed in this paradise
We are passengers and there’s no one at the wheel
No matter how well you can outdo me
There is one thing you will never do and it’s feel
—“Evolution”
Crow says “Evolution” was inspired, in part, by stories about The Beatles using AI. She also came across something on social media where AI wrote a song that sounded like Oasis but had someone else singing that mimicked the band perfectly.
“This young songwriter that I happened to work with on this record played me a demo that she wrote with two songwriters here in Nashville, and she needed a guy singer, so she got John Mayer for $5 [with] AI, and I just was terrified,” Crow explains. “I feel like unless we have some moral center, some gravity that pulls our feet to the earth to the essence of who we are, that we’re entering dangerous territory for artists.”
Other songs, like “You Can’t Change the Weather,” come from a more hopeful place while thinking of her two sons. Crow wrote the song with longtime collaborator Jeff Trott; it comes from the understanding that “there are certain things you cannot change, but you are not alone.”
“It’s hard to be alive and it’s hard to feel and not grapple with the weight of that,” she adds. “We cannot fix things but we can look around and just ask, ‘Where can I help somebody?’ and the lesson is always there.”
Meanwhile, “Where,” originally penned with Bottrell around 2008 for her Detours record, resurfaced for Evolution. Crow says the song is “who I am” and embodies a question she asks herself every day: Where can we be free / If to be free means learning not to care?
For Crow, not caring and not having attachments is difficult. She is dedicated to her home life and being a mother to two sons. She is also embedded within the music community as an artist, songwriter, and producer. When she’s not working on her own art, she frequently serves as a collaborator, including being featured on Colbie Caillat’s recent single “I’ll Be Here.”
“Sheryl is a trailblazing artist and an inspiring woman I have always looked up to,” Caillat says. “The vulnerability and timelessness in her songwriting and music, the way she’s guided her career as a musician and producer as well as an artist, and the lifestyle she lives is filled with strength, kindness, and health. She’s an example of finding balance in all that you love. I’m proud to know her and to work with her.”
Crow’s impact on the music world spans time and genre as she also nearly joined Fleetwood Mac, which Stevie Nicks revealed during her 2023 Nashville tour stop. Ahead of Crow and Nicks’ duet on “Landslide,” Nicks shared the story of how the pair were almost bandmates 16 years prior.
“She reached for my hand and she told the audience how I was one of the only people ever to almost join Fleetwood Mac, but that I did not because I had this newborn baby,” Crow recalls. “That is very true. Every decision I made during that time—and still—is always about them. I did not want to move. I just didn’t want to pick up my kid and travel and so while we were talking about it, and dreaming about it, that’s as far as we got.”
The longtime friends and collaborators also shared the stage at Crow’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction for a performance of “Strong Enough.” It was a full circle moment for Crow, who says Nicks was the kind of woman she wanted to grow up to be all those years ago while listening to her records in her childhood home.
“Not only knowing her, but having her be there to be a part of my induction, and then, of course, Peter Frampton, who was my first concert—there were a lot of moments that I still feel like are just heavenly,” she says.
While reflecting on her own career, Crow says the label “legacy artist” finally feels celebratory.
“I walked out on stage at Bonnaroo and saw 65,000 people younger than me singing the words to my songs and that’s when you realize, ‘OK, your music is not the music of their generation, but it’s the music that was a part of their growing up and they were exposed to that because of their parents or because of radio,’” she says of her 2023 Bonnaroo performance. “That is a gift. To be a part of a soundtrack to people’s lives … I couldn’t even ask for anything more humbling than that.”
All photos by Dove Shore
