The crow road

Published on Friday 8 February 2008 17:20

IT'S raining hard through Sheryl Crow's last day of rehearsals with her band as she prepares for her two sold-out shows in New York. They are practising 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, the rambunctious and vulnerable forthcoming seventh album from Crow.

The Hit Farm, about 45 minutes from Nashville, is Crow's 154-acre ranch, where horses graze, the tractors run on bio-diesel, the vegetable gardens are being converted to organic farming and solar power will provide sustainable electricity.

Part-way through one of her hits, 'My Favourite Mistake,' sunlight comes through a window and Crow walks away from the band, still singing into her wireless microphone, to get a better look. The late-afternoon sky has turned bright blue, with puffy clouds, and the view of lush, rolling hillsides has taken on a glow that Crow recognises. "Tornadoes," she says. After rehearsal she drives a visitor and her two yellow Labradors, Rex and Flossy, to one of her farmhouses, where dinner is awaiting the band and crew. "I grew up in the flattest part of America, and it's just Tornado Central," says the singer, who turns 46 tomorrow. "When the sky looks bright, and it's been dark all day, and it's almost night-time, I just get the creeps."

She checks the emergency radio as she gives the interview and shares a bottle of Chteauneuf-du-Pape. Nearby, her nine-month-old son Wyatt Steven, whom she adopted last year, plinks a toy piano under the eye of a nanny and band members.

Storms often lurk behind sunshine in 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 such as '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 says. "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. 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 Sixties peace and love. The album begins with songs about the state of the world: the Iraq war in 'God Bless This Mess'; what 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!"

Then it turns personal, including the soul-style break-up 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 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," Crow says. "I was just feeling like crawling into my closet with a guitar and writing."

Soon after the break-up 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 says, "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, Crow made Detours with Bill Bottrell. He produced Tuesday Night Music Club, working with a collective of underdog LA musicians he had gathered. Tuesday Night Music Club, with its informal, homegrown arrangements, made Crow a star and sold millions. But it left a bitter aftertaste, as her collaborators – with whom she shared credits and publishing royalties – squabbled publicly over who deserved what.

"Bill and I never really had any beef with each other," Crow says. "He just kind of disappeared from the whole scenario in order to not be in anyone's corner.

"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."

Crow had intended to make her second album with 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 such as '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 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 Crow at a post-Grammy party. "We never spoke of the old days," Bottrell says over the phone. "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', 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.

Now, like many established stars, Crow is thinking on a smaller scale. "There's something fantastic about knowing I'm not going to get played on the radio," she says. "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 website 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 make-up, 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 break-up. Video treatments await her perusal on her kitchen counter as she cuddles Wyatt before taking him off to bed.

"I can't even read those," she says 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 says. "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." v

• Detours is released February 25 www.sherylcrow.com