Singer's newfound ‘fearlessness' comes through on ‘Detours'

Photos taken in New York on Feb. 1, 2008 by Rick Maiman

NEW YORK - Not much scares Sheryl Crow these days. Not breast cancer, which she's battled into remission. Not public heartbreak, which is less raw now. Not writing bolder lyrics, which means less radio play. "The last three years were a real awakening for me," Crow says, during a stop to promote her first album since 2005. "I've felt a fearlessness I've never felt before." That bravery is the product of a one-two punch - the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness only days after the collapse of her engagement to bike champion Lance Armstrong. Last spring, she poured out her feelings in a studio built at her new Tennessee farm. With newly adopted baby Wyatt keeping her company, she knocked out 24 songs in 40 days. The result is "Detours," a CD that veers from the intensely personal to the unabashedly political, from cancer and love lost to Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war. "A lot of defining moments brought me to a place where by the time I sat down to write, I felt not only inspired but urgent about what I was writing about," she says

A key feature of the new disc is a more strident political stance taken by a songwriter more known for such good-time hits as "Soak Up the Sun," "All I Wanna Do" and "If It Makes You Happy." And while she's been outspoken before about social issues - attacking genocide on "Redemption Day" and guns on "Love Is a Good Thing" - Crow says her new fearlessness can be heard in the evolution of one lyric in particular.

Six years ago, her song "Steve McQueen" originally contained the lines, "We've got liars in the White House/And all our pop stars look like porn." She reluctantly scrapped it, afraid to offend Bill Clinton fans. In the final version of that song, "liars" became "rock stars."

No more.

On the new disc, Crow goes right after the current commander in chief. On "God Bless This Mess," she sings that President Bush after 9/11 "spoke words of comfort with tears in his eyes/Then he led us as a nation into a war all based on lies."

"It was almost like, ‘OK, the gauntlet's been thrown. I'm going in,' " Crow says. "I'm not the only one that feels the way I feel. And I don't feel afraid to say the way I feel."

Steve Berman, president of sales and marketing at Interscope Geffen A&M, says the album's content seems perfectly suited to its recent release date - Super Tuesday.

"She's not afraid ... of running from what's happening in the world today," he says. "Sheryl, as an artist, has the ability to do what few artists can do."

Avoiding the spotlight

Crow, who turned 46 on Feb. 11, looks easily two decades younger than her age. She wears formfitting jeans and a clingy top, highlighting her petite, athletic shape. Her hair is a sun-kissed collection of loose curls. A product of Kennett, Mo., she lived for years in Los Angeles as a backup singer and then star, and later in Texas, with Armstrong. Now she's made a home in a 154-acre farm outside Nashville, Tenn. The intense media interest in her life following the very public breakup with Armstrong and subsequent cancer diagnosis is not something she misses. Her current distance from the tabloids - and, of course, the new baby - have helped clear her head. Wyatt is 9 months old and almost walking. "I'm really, really happy with where I am in my life," she says. "And certainly, after having gone through breast cancer, I feel like I have a clear overview. I feel that whole experience really brought me back to remembering who it is I've always wanted to be." On the 14-song CD, Crow deals with cancer ("Make It Go Away"), heartache ("Now That You're Gone," "Detours"), cultural understanding ("Shine Over Babylon," "Peace Be Upon Us"), worldwide rioting over gas shortages by 2017 ("Gasoline") and flooded New Orleans ("Love Is Free"). "I grew up in middle America. I grew up with parents that raised me knowing the value of a dollar and with a lot of respect for my elders, a lot of respect for myself and the people around me," she says.

Fans looking for specific references to former beau Armstrong are out of luck, though the song "Diamond Ring" has the lyric: "Diamonds may be sweet/But to me they just bring on cold feet."

"I get to talk about it on my own terms, hopefully in a poetic way, in a way that's inspired from the spirit," she says. "The gory details aren't as interesting anyway."

The new CD sees Crow reconnecting with Bill Bottrell, who produced her 1993 debut album, "Tuesday Night Music Club." Despite its success, the pair fell out over the proper apportioning of credit.

She called him up out of the blue last year, said a record was welling up inside her like a geyser and wanted to know if they still had a creative "juju."

"He said, ‘I've been waiting for this call for years.' That made me feel like, ‘OK, we're on the right course,' " she recalls. "I think it's the most frank record, definitely. And the least crafted record perhaps."

Wake-up call for nation

Crow hopes the new album is a wake-up call for a nation that's been in a deep slumber during the Bush years. Her dislike of the administration is palpable.

"A lot of people in my age group I think are talking about the same thing - how in the last seven years, we as a nation have been taken on a grand tour away from what this nation was meant to be," she says. "I'm feeling awake with not only frustration but with a feeling of possibility and an urgency to try to incite people to owning our power."

Part of that urgency, she says, comes from worrying about Wyatt and what kind of future he'll have. He gets his own song on the new CD - "Lullaby for Wyatt." Crow says the idea of adoption evolved from her experiences over the past few years. She found in the darkness that she had a lot of love to give.

Whether or not her fans snap up the new CD in droves doesn't necessarily worry her. "Now I'm past the point of really caring," she says.

"My objective is that I just want to write about the things that really matter to me and that's how I wound up with a record like this. If it gets played, that's fantastic."

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

"DETOURS" Available NOW

Basking in the Sun Though Wary of a Storm

By JON PARELES - Picture: Josh Haner
Published: February 5, 2008

NASHVILLE - It had rained hard through Sheryl Crow's last day of rehearsals with her band as she prepared for her two sold-out shows at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza on Wednesday and Thursday. They were practicing in a converted barn - with carpets on the wall and guitars in overhead racks - at what's called the Hit Farm in the credits to "Detours" (A&M), the rambunctious and vulnerable album she will release on Tuesday. The Hit Farm, about 45 minutes from Nashville, is Ms. Crow's 154-acre ranch, where horses graze, the tractors run on biodiesel, the vegetable gardens are being converted to organic farming, and solar power will provide sustainable electricity.Partway through one of her hits, "My Favorite Mistake," sunlight came through a window, and Ms. Crow walked away from the band, still singing into her wireless microphone, to get a better look. The late-afternoon sky had turned bright blue, with puffy white clouds, and the view of lush, rolling hillsides had a certain glow.

Ms. Crow recognized it: "Tornadoes," she said. After rehearsal she was driving a visitor and her two yellow Labradors, Rex and Flossy, to one of her farmhouses, where dinner was awaiting the band and crew. "I grew up in the flattest part of America, and it's just Tornado Central," said Ms. Crow, who was born and raised in Kennett, Mo., and turns 46 on Feb. 11. "When the sky looks bright, and it's been dark all day, and it's almost nighttime, I just get the creeps."

She checked the emergency radio as she gave an interview and shared a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Nearby, her 9-month-old son, Wyatt Steven, plinked a toy piano under the eye of a nanny and band members. During the interview squalls knocked over garbage cans and slammed her farmhouse doors. A tornado blew through a town just a few miles away.

Storms often lurk behind sunshine in Ms. Crow's songs. Since the release of her 1993 debut album, "Tuesday Night Music Club," she has sold millions of albums with the cheerful choruses of hits like "All I Wanna Do" and "Everyday Is a Winding Road," sung with girlish exuberance over twangy guitars. But those choruses are catchy wishful thinking - an escape from the disenchanted, uncertain verses.

"It's part of my nature, that grounding part of me," she said. "While everything is great, there's still that little, ‘Mmm, everything could fall apart.' "

"I don't believe it, I don't buy into it," she continued. "But when you write, if you try to get out of your own way, your subconscious will manage to elbow its own way in there."

On "Detours," more darkness surfaces, although the choruses stay hopeful, and there's a streak of 1960s peace and love. The album begins with songs about the state of the world: the Iraq war in "God Bless This Mess"; what Ms. Crow calls "a little apocalyptic diatribe" in "Shine Over Babylon"; thoughts of a flooded New Orleans in "Love Is Free"; and visions of scarcity and riots in the near future in "Gasoline," a cowbell-bonking rocker with the joyful chorus "Gasoline will be free!" (At rehearsal, it easily segued into the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter.")

Then it turns personal, including the soul-style breakup songs "Diamond Ring" and "Now That You're Gone" and the desolate "Make It Go Away," about undergoing treatment for breast cancer in 2006. "I crawl into my circumstance/Lay on the table begging for another chance," she sings over a sparsely strummed acoustic guitar. "I was a good girl, now I can't understand/How to make it go away."

In the three years since Ms. Crow released "Wildflower" - a collection of pensive, string-laden songs that was her first studio album to sell less than a million copies - she has changed everything from her residence to her commercial expectations. Early in 2006 her engagement to the cyclist Lance Armstrong ended. The new album's title song "was a direct response to the ending of a very public relationship and feeling very, very backed in a corner and also very private," Ms. Crow said. "I was just feeling like crawling into my closet with a guitar and writing."

Soon after the breakup her cancer was diagnosed. By the end of that year, after treatment, she had moved from Los Angeles to the Tennessee farm, which is close to family members in Nashville and Missouri. She adopted Wyatt in May 2007.

"Not to sound cornball," she said, "but writing a record with a new baby, it just makes everything feel so much more urgent. I felt like I had my fist in the air, going I dare you to censor me, I dare you - like a crazy woman."

After producing her last four studio albums herself, Ms. Crow made "Detours" with Bill Bottrell. He produced "Tuesday Night Music Club," working with a collective of underdog Los Angeles musicians he had gathered. That album, with its informal, homegrown arrangements, made Ms. Crow a star and sold millions of copies. But it left a bitter aftertaste, as her collaborators - with whom she shared songwriting credits and publishing royalties - squabbled publicly over who deserved what.

"Bill and I never really had any beef with each other," Ms. Crow said. "When everything went down, he just kind of disappeared from the whole scenario in order to not be in anyone's corner."

She added, "In my diplomacy, I never really told the truth about it, which is that the people who worked on the record are who they were before I ever met them. They were discontented and bitter."

By telephone from his home in California, Mr. Bottrell said: "The truth is hard to describe, but it lies between what all the people were shouting. It was all very vague and very complicated. She wrote the majority of the album. The guys and I contributed writing and lyrics, including some personal things. However, the sound was the sound that I developed."

Ms. Crow had intended to make her second album with Mr. Bottrell and wrote songs with him, but he left after the first day of sessions in New Orleans. So she produced the 1996 "Sheryl Crow" herself, disproving any notions that she had just been the girl singer on her debut. Songs like "Redemption Day," about genocide, and "Love Is a Good Thing," about gun control and consumerism, were the first signs of the political streak that surfaces so strongly on "Detours."

The experience led Mr. Bottrell to drop out of the recording business for a few years. He resumed his career to produce Shelby Lynne's 2000 album, "I Am Shelby Lynne," and was nominated for a Grammy Award as producer of the year.

He ran into Ms. Crow, he said, at a post-Grammy party. "We were both really pleased to see each other," he said. "She said, ‘Let's work together,' and I said, ‘Well, maybe we should talk.' And she said, ‘Talk? Let's just work.' "

And work, he said, is what they did when they got together. "We never spoke of the old days," Mr. Bottrell said. "There's a solipsism about it - you just close your eyes and do it." He had brought some partly finished songs, including the bouncy, Rickie Lee Jones-like groove of "Love Is Free"; the stately blare of "Shine Over Babylon"; and the hippie-reggae jam "Out of Our Heads." For the Eastern-tinged "Peace Be Upon Us," Mr. Bottrell used connections in Bahrain - where he had spent six months waiting to work with Michael Jackson - to find a guest vocalist, Ahmed Al Hirmi, for a verse in Arabic.

Ms. Crow, Mr. Bottrell and a handful of other musicians recorded 24 songs in 40 days - a change, Ms. Crow said, from the agonized decision-making of the albums she produced herself. They made most of "Detours" in the basement rooms that Ms. Crow has turned into a recording studio: a parlor with couches and keyboards, a control room and bedroom-size spaces for guitars, drums and vocals. Her gold records are on the wall.

"It's the first time I've ever hung these," she said. "I had never taken them out of the packages."

Now, like many established stars, she is thinking on a smaller scale. "There's something really fantastic about knowing I'm not going to get played at radio," she said. "I'm not interested in making the kind of music that would compete in that genre, so it's great. It leaves me to my own devices without the framework of a pop commercial hit."

She made a full-scale video for "Love Is Free" but has also released cheap, quick ones for "Shine Over Babylon," "Gasoline" and "God Bless This Mess" on her Web site and YouTube. For "God Bless This Mess," in which she sings that the president "led us as a nation into a war all based on lies," she took her guitar and sang in front of the White House. "You roll out of bed, no hair, no makeup, totally guerrilla, fall out of a van with a couple of guys with video cameras," she said, "and it's on YouTube a couple of days later."

She wouldn't mind a Top 40 hit, of course, and neither would her label. Songs like "Gasoline" and "Out of Our Heads" sound ready for singalongs, while "Now That You're Gone" brings classic soul concision to the ambivalences of a breakup. Video treatments awaited her perusal on her kitchen counter as she cuddled Wyatt before taking him off to bed.

"I can't even read those," she said with a laugh. "I always tell my manager: ‘Which one do you like? Just give me the brief synopsis. Tell me if I have to do anything stupid.' "

As for the album, "I just want people to hear it," she said. "I'm sure I'm going to get hit from a lot of different angles with the album being pointed and political and sardonic and caustic, but I don't care. I want people to love it or hate it."

WITH "DETOURS", SHERYL CROW TAKES ROADS LESS TRAVELED

By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY
Picture: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY

Most critics have yet to weigh in on Sheryl Crow's new album, Detours, which is out Tuesday. But at least one has found that Shine Over Babylon, a track on the disc, puts him to sleep. That would be Wyatt Steven Crow, the singer/songwriter's 9-month-old son. "We went out on the road when he was around 4 months old," Crow recalls. "And whenever he would get a little fussy, we would just put on Shine Over Babylon and he'd go straight down." There's actually a tender ballad on the album called Lullaby for Wyatt, but "he didn't want to hear that. He wanted to hear something loud and boisterous." Wyatt was "the informing factor for how I wrote and what I wrote about on this record," she says. But Crow, 45, drew on a variety of experiences in crafting her new songs - including her brush with breast cancer and the breakup of her highly publicized engagement to champion cyclist (and fellow cancer survivor) Lance Armstrong. "The last three or four years were really life-changing for me," says Crow. "Having this beautiful, innocent little spirit who's looking to me for answers and comfort, compounded with everything else that

was going on around me and around everyone else, all the chaos in the world - it just created this sense of urgency, and a real fearlessness."

"The last three or four years were really life-changing for me," says Crow. "Having this beautiful, innocent little spirit who's looking to me for answers and comfort, compounded with everything else that was going on around me and around everyone else, all the chaos in the world - it just created this sense of urgency, and a real fearlessness."

Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis, who reviewed the album, says Detours is "a gambit to make (Crow's) artistry triumph over celebrity, both in the sounds she explores and the range of issues she addresses. She's beginning to take her social and political identity pretty seriously, and that's reflected here."

New album sounds political notes

Crow's new material is as politically pointed as it is introspective. On God Bless This Mess, Crow sings of a president who leads his "nation into a war all based on lies." The fiercely eco-friendly Gasoline takes aim at "the characters in Washington afraid of popping the greed vein."

"The more dire things become, the more we seem to feel defeated," says Crow. "All this information comes at us, but we can just turn off the TV and not be emotionally invested.

"Thankfully, though, I'm seeing people waking up. We've seen how dysfunctional our government can be, and we have an opportunity now to demand some serious answers and repercussions - to get off this detour we've been on and back on what our course should be."

Crow, who will perform in August at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, isn't yet leaning toward one presidential candidate to lead this charge. Though she's a fan of Hillary Clinton, she says, "I appreciate so much that John EdwardsBusiness-Should-Not-Fear-Edwards Jan-08 is hammering this idea of special interests, that almost every decision in our government (is dictated) by special-interest groups who don't represent the people. And I love the idea that Obama is at least speaking about change. But I don't know who can get us out of this quagmire."

Crow is even less committal about her relationship status. "I'm dating" is all she'll say. There are songs on Detours that seem to allude to Armstrong, notably Diamond Ring, on which she sings, "Diamonds may be sweet/ But to me they just bring on cold feet/ Diamond ring ... (expletive) up everything."

But Crow describes the song as more "theatrical" than confessional, and notes that Armstrong - whom she refers to only as "my ex" - wasn't her first fiancé. "The fact that the diamond ring represents the solidification of a relationship seems ironic to me. I seem to get the ring when it's a last-ditch-effort kind of thing. The relationship is already starting to fall apart, so it's like, 'Let's get engaged and see if that makes it better.' "

Marriage remains a possibility

Not that Crow has soured on the idea of marriage. "I would love to be married. I come from a close-knit family, and I believe in the power of a wonderful relationship based on being equal and being allies. I love being in relationships, and I've learned more about myself through them." She adds that she considers Armstrong a friend: "I'm on good terms with my ex, and I have a lot of respect for him."

Still, Crow, who had been linked to Eric Clapton and Owen Wilson prior to dating Armstrong, says being connected "to some very visible, successful, wonderful people is not without its complications. After being diagnosed with breast cancer and going through treatment, I paused for a moment to look at my life and ask, 'What's missing?' And I thought, 'Maybe I'm clinging too much to this picture of what a conventional family is supposed to look like. Does it have to look like Mom and Dad and baby?' Not necessarily."

Crow says that she "always felt I would adopt a child, even if I had my own biologically. I've always had a strong maternal instinct." And so far, she has found motherhood "strangely not difficult. (Wyatt's) a great kid. He came into the world very much at ease. He was smiling at 2 weeks old. He's just a really joyful little dude."

So would Crow consider adopting, or trying to conceive, a sibling for Wyatt? She's not saying. "I'm so happy with where I am that I can't even think about two seconds from now."

Source: USAToday.com