Larry Schwartz
Sheryl Crow adjusts a harmonica holder. Someone yells out, “Dylan!” and the Missouri-born singer-songwriter, mimicking Bob’s husky midwestern drawl, tells the crowd of a telephone call suggesting she record one of his songs on her new album. She thought she’d give him a break …
“Young upstart,” she upbraids herself.
“I’ve had the wonderful luxury of playing with him a lot,” she’d said when we met earlier in the day. “When I’ve hung around, he’s always had me come up and play with
him. He and I have talked about doing some recordings and writing together. We’ve talked about doing some touring. We’re always kind of talking of doing something …”
Dylan’s manager rang during his recent tour of Australia to suggest she might want to record a track omitted from his acclaimed Time Out of Mind. “And my album was already done,” she says. “It was already mixed, mastered, scheduled to come out and I just held everything.”
She played his Mississippi to the music industry crowd during a recent promotional show at the Continental, Prahran. “What they do is they play it for you,” she says. “They let you do a demo version or they’ll do a demo version. But you can never keep the version with his voice on it. He’s
had trouble over the last 30 years with stuff getting out.”
It’s decades since singer-songwriters from Prince to Springsteen were tagged the New Dylan and, Crow, a Grammy award-winner who has achieved both critical acclaim and popular success, has little need to bask in reflected glory. But Dylan’s stature is such that his interest in offering even
a leftover song for her third album can’t hurt.
“I spent a year in the mouth of a whale/with a flame and a book of signs,” she sings, picking at an open-tuned guitar on Riverwide, a glorious song from the new album, The Globe Sessions. It was a song that she says came to her easily after frustrated attempts at recording something else.
“I think it was also a lot of taking stock of my experiences over the last five years and defining what was good and what wasn’t,” she says. “That song has a mythical and mystical overview to it. It’s more a song of encouragement to myself than anything else.”
She moved from Los Angeles to New York several years ago. There Goes The Neighbourhood has been described as a surreal character study of the Manhattan meat-packing district where she recorded the album in her own studio with musician friends including veteran Bobby Keyes on
saxophone, Benmont Tench (of Tom
Petty’s Heartbreakers) on piano, Lisa Germano (violin) and guitarist Jay Bennett of Wilco.
“There’s an area of warehouse companies that process beef, chicken, lamb, every kind of meat you can imagine and the smell is quite incredible,” she says. “They’ve been cleaning up over the last couple of years and I guess updating this archaic meat-processing. But by night it just turns
into a mad Babylon with clubs and discos and hell’s angels and transvestites, hookers and just a frenetic energy. You can just kind of walk out and be amongst it.”
She says her 1993 debut, Tuesday Night Music Club, reflected the kind of sounds associated with Los Angeles. The self-titled follow-up in 1996 was very much inspired by New Orleans. But while Globe was recorded in New York, where she now lives, she considers it a more personal work
not bound by sense of place.
“This album feels more personal to me,” Crow says. “Only in one place do you sense the streets of New York.”
Globe Sessions is revealing in the sense that Springsteen was when he foreshadowed the demise of a short-lived marriage on Tunnel Of Love in 1987. Crow chronicles her own failed romance. “And my heart may break again before it ends,” she sings on one track. “And I might be stupid
enough to wanna fall again/ ‘Cos I’ve gotten used to crash and burn.” Another has a note of desperation. “If you could only see/ What love has made me/ Then I’d no longer be in your mind/ The difficult kind.”
Is there a personal cost in pursuing so public a vocation? “I guess there has been,” Crow says. “It’s definitely been a trade-off. I don’t know very many women who haven’t gone through that maternal instinct to want to have kids and I’m reaching 36. I’m not married. I’ve had some wonderful
relationships and I may still have kids. You just never know.
“There’s definitely a feeling of loss sometimes when you’ve dedicated your life to something and you pull back and you realise that’s all you’ve dedicated your life to. You haven’t really made anything else a priority. There’s a strange mourning that goes on there when you step back and realise
the things you’ve left over.”
She sets little store in celebrity for its own sake. “I think if you’re expecting fans to make you feel complete, it’s very empty,” she says. “If you read interviews with Madonna, she talks about how she never felt like her dad approved of her. That was the drive to want to have 10,000 people
praising her and applauding her. That is in a lot of cases what the motivation is. And if you’re looking for that, then of course it’s an empty feeling.”
Daughter of an attorney and music teacher, she was raised in Kennett, a cotton, soya bean and cantaloupe farming town with a population of not quite 11,000. She wasn’t a country music fan. So she’d tune into rock and pop stations from Memphis and Chicago. She sang in a covers band
and taught music before moving to Los Angeles at 24.
“Friends hooked me up with other people to stay with. When I got there, they were doing lots of cocaine. I’d just lived a sheltered life. I thought I had driven into the most decadent metropolis.”
Crow recently acted as “a junkie who gets killed in the first five minutes” in a film called The Minus Man. “I’d never acted and was really reluctant to even try anything and this just seemed like a good opportunity. I had good friends in the film and it was small enough. I didn’t think this was
going to change my whole credibility. I think that was my debut and perhaps my farewell performance.”
She’s in music for the long haul. “Well, I look at Patti Smith and I think there’s no reason why I can’t be playing vital rock music (at her age),” she says. “Obviously your audience is going to change. They’re going to grow with you. I don’t know that I’ll ever continue to do it at the pace I’m doing
it. There are other things that I want to do in my life. But I don’t see any reason why I can’t still be making music when I’m 50.”
The Sunday Age, 08th of November 1998
Larry Schwartz Writer 