Sheryl Crow Reconnects With Old Producer On New Album
January 11, 2008
Sheryl Crow will release her new album, Detours, on February 5, and while making the record, she surprised a former collaborator with a phone call. Crow famously had a falling out with the musicians who recorded her breakthrough record, Tuesday Night Music Club, after the success of her debut. Producer Bill Bottrell called Crow "hopeless" and "obnoxious" in a Rolling Stone interview in the mid-'90s.
However, Crow buried the hatchet with Bottrell last summer while working on Detours. "He said, ‘I've been waiting years for this call,'" Crow told Rolling Stone. "It was a sweet homecoming for the both of us." Crow and Bottrell recorded 24 songs in about a month and a half in Crow's Nashville home. She says the adoption of her son Wyatt inspired her songwriting this time. "I couldn't write fast enough - having this tiny, innocent spirit made me fearless," she says. "I felt a sense of urgency to write about what's really happening."
Detours includes the political "God Bless This Mess," the lead single "Love Is Free" and "Diamond Ring," of which Crow jokingly notes, "All I can say is that I've been engaged three times. So I have a thing about diamonds."
Crow currently has three concerts on tap: two appearances in New York City on February 6 and 7 and one in Los Angeles on March 11.
In the Studio: Sheryl Crow Dials Up Old Friends, Protests War on Upcoming Album
Sheryl Crow's 1993 debut, Tuesday Night Music Club, was a bittersweet experience. While hits like "All I Wanna Do" pushed the album to seven-times-platinum status, Crow's friendships with the musicians she worked with - known as the Tuesday Night Music Club - fell apart amid allegations that Crow took too much credit. Epitomizing the animosity, TNMC producer Bill Bottrell called Crow "hopeless" and "obnoxious" in a 1996 Rolling Stone cover story.
So it was surprising that in August Crow dialed up Bottrell. "He said, ‘I've been waiting years for this call,'" Crow says. "It was a sweet homecoming for the both of us." In a burst of creativity, they recorded twenty-four songs in forty days in the basement studio of Crow's Nashville-area home. The disc's fourteen tracks are among Crow's most personal, a fact she attributes to the adoption of her son, Wyatt, in 2007. "I couldn't write fast enough - having this tiny, innocent spirit made me fearless," she says. "I felt a sense of urgency to write about what's really happening." The album opens with the raw "God Bless This Mess," which addresses 9/11, when "the president spoke words of comfort with tears in his eyes/Then he led us as a nation into a war all based on lies." And a handful of cuts, such as "Diamond Ring" ("Diamond ring," Crow sings, "shouldn't change a thing/Fucks up everything"), seem to allude to her called-off engagement to Lance Armstrong. "All I can say is that I've been engaged three times," she says with a laugh. "So I have a thing about diamonds." Crow adds that the sultry R&B groove and lyrics of liberation on "Now That You're Gone" definitely don't address her ex. "That's not about Lance," she says. "I dedicate that one to Karl Rove Jan 11, 2008
