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dream they were excitedly prepar-
ing to play together again.
At 57, Crow’s life has been filled
with connections like this — and
her upcoming record, the Ameri-
cana-leaning “Threads,” is all
about celebrating them. Like a mu-
sical memoir tracing her most fan-
tastical rock ’n’ roll encounters, the
17-track album of collaborations
features two dozen guests whom
Crow has met along her journey
from Hollywood backup singer to
nine-time Grammy winner. They
include lifelong heroes such as
Keith Richards, Stevie Nicks, Bon-
nie Raitt and Willie Nelson as well
as younger musicians like Maren
Morris and Brandi Carlile, whom
Crow believes will carry their torch.
Crow is calling “Threads” her final
album, though she has no plans to
stop making music, and she’ll con-
tinue to release of-the-moment
singles as she pleases.
From the don’t-look-back jew-
els of 1993’s “Tuesday Night Music
Club” onward, Crow fused soul-
journeying ’60s idealism with im-
maculate ’70s songcraft to become
a ’90s Lilith Fair icon. Her poppy
alt-country takes in the slick swag-
ger of Jagger/Richards in the same
breath as the gleaming emotional
chaos of Buckingham/Nicks, all to
narrate the defiant perspective of a
female adventurer, in pursuit of
herself. In her earliest songs, Crow
stares at the desert sky and asks
big questions; finds comfort in her
“calling” if not in romance; feels
“like a stranger” in her own life.
The mega-hits on which she
made her name — “All I Wanna
Do,” “If It Makes You Happy” —
were only deceptively cheery, al-
ways undercut with a darkness, an
irreverence, an existential edge;
sung with a virtuosic tear-in-my-
beer ache that could make bikers
cry. The lyric “All I wanna do is have
a little fun before I die” was ad-
apted from a very Gen X poem by
Wyn Cooper. “Soak Up the Sun”
opens on a line about Crow’s
“friend the communist,” while its
central message — she is going to
bask in the sun because “it’s still
free” — is slyly anti-consumerist.
And the quiet-loud alt-rock reach
of “If It Makes You Happy” — with
its tale of leaving home, weed and
Coltrane, scraping mold off of
bread — all leads to one question:
“Why the hell are you so sad?”
A magnetic-poetry set of Crow’s
lyrics would include “intellectual-
ism,” “acid” and “The Clash.” Yet
these words are so emotionally
honest and singable and ingrained
in the pop consciousness that it
can feel like she invented karaoke.
“I love the juxtaposition of pointing
out the absurd or the imperfect,”
Crow says, sitting cross-legged in a
white T-shirt and blue jeans, her
blond hair in a low ponytail, “and
making it feel buoyant.”
It’s a wonder Crow is not widely
considered a rock hero already.
Her career has contained the kind
of wild multitudes more often af-
forded to men. Maybe Crow — a
multi-instrumentalist as well as a
singer-songwriter — was just radi-
cally out of time: Embraced by her
classic-rock forebears, with few ob-
vious peers, and now beloved
across the spectrum of millennial
pop and rock. Kacey Musgraves re-
corded her sublime, Grammy-win-
ning “Golden Hour” at Crow’s
home studio. The Americana su-
pergroup Highwomen, with Carlile
and Morris, enlisted her to sing on
the title song — a gender-swapped
rewrite of an outlaw classic.
‘Happy’ keeps flowing
A seemingly endless string of in-
die “If It Makes You Happy” covers
has emerged of late, including ver-
sions by the esteemed singer-song-
writers Sharon Van Etten and
Phoebe Bridgers, not to mention
punk heroes Screaming Females.
Haim and Lorde teamed on stage
in 2013 to cover Crow’s early single
“Strong Enough,” and last year
Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan cov-
ered the same song with Katie
Crutchfield of Waxahatchee. Jor-
dan, now 20, often performed
“Strong Enough” at a local coffee
shop in high school. When I suggest
that some quality of Crow’s song-
book lends itself to duets among
young women, Jordan interjects:
“Sisterhood!”
In 2015, the Seattle DIY musi-
cian Robin Edwards, a.k.a. Lisa
Prank, co-edited a fanzine called
Summer of Sheryl, which situated
Crow in a punk-rock context. “I
reread her lyrics obsessively and
thought, ‘What’s going on here?’ ”
says Edwards. “Sheryl didn’t fit in
with the cool kids of the ’90s, and
she was writing lyrics that are
pretty outwardly subversive, and
they snuck onto commercial ra-
dio.” For Edwards, the wrenching
levity of Crow’s 1998 single “My Fa-
vorite Mistake” is especially devas-
tating. “It describes such a com-
plex, specific relationship, where
you know it’s bad for you, but you
keep doing it,” she says. “The way
she articulates that — ‘Your
friends act sorry for me / They
watch you pretend to adore me’ —
is so visceral and brutal.”
Crow and her family are still
salty-haired upon returning from a
vacation to Florida, before third
and sixth grades start up. Sitting
in her living room, we are occa-
sionally visited by one of her two
sons, who hoverboards in to in-
quire sweetly about his backpack,
or pet turtle, or apple juice.
She was born in Kennett, Mo.,
the third of four children of a piano
teacher and a lawyer-trumpetist,
who had a swing band together. A
former Girl Scout, Crow worked as
an elementary school music
teacher in Fenton, Mo., before pur-
suing an artistic career in earnest.
After calling L.A. home base for 20
years, she moved to Tennessee in
2006 to be nearer to her parents,
not long after a diagnosis with
breast cancer, which she beat. She
adopted Wyatt and Levi in 2007
and 2010. (Crow has never married,
though in the early 2000s she was
engaged to Lance Armstrong.)
One of Crow’s earliest gigs in
L.A. was as a backup singer for
Michael Jackson, on his Bad tour
— now a focal point of the child
abuse allegations against Jackson.
On her first record’s “The Na-Na
Song,” Crow openly called out the
harassment she experienced on
that tour: “Clarence Thomas organ
grinder, Frank DiLeo’s dong / May-
be if I’d let him, I’d have had a hit
song,” referencing the conserva-
tive Supreme Court justice (ac-
cused of sexual harassment by Ani-
ta Hall in 1991) on the one hand, and
Jackson’s manager, DiLeo, on the
other. Another “Tuesday” song,
“What I Can Do for You,” so directly
and uncomfortably confronts
themes of sexual harassment and
abuse of power that it sounds like a
modern #MeToo anthem.
“I did get some blowback, and
for a moment, a legal situation,”
Crow says. (Crow told Billboard
that DiLeo filed a lawsuit against
her, but died not long thereafter, in
201 1). “But a legal situation couldn’t
hold a candle to what I went
through. I’m a strong person, and I
know how to defend myself, but Iwas certainly threatened to never
have a career. The people who in-
spired me, like Bob Dylan, were
truth-tellers. You are at risk when
you write the truth. But someone
has to do it.”
I ask her about some of her
more delightfully shocking lyrical
Easter eggs. What about, for exam-
ple, that bit from 1996’s “Maybe An-
gels,” about having “witnesses to
what the government denies”?
“I’m a believer in aliens,” she says
simply, clutching a throw pillow de-
picting a mallard duck. I point to
another unshakable line — “I’ve
been swimming in a sea of anar-
chy,” from “Everyday Is a Winding
Road” — and Crow tells me the
song was inspired by a very good
musician friend, who ultimately
hung himself in a park. He had a
newborn named Sunday, which
gnawed at her: “He’s got a daugh-
ter he calls Easter,” Crow sings.
“She was born on a Tuesday night.”
“There was a time when I hung
out with conspiracy theorists and
Bukowski-esque types who were
staring at the bottom of the bottle
— people who I thought challenged
my intellect,” Crow explains. “We
prided ourselves on being anar-
chists. When this guy killed him-
self, it all seemed so absurd: to
mask living as having meaning be-
cause you’re intelligent. It brought
everything to a screeching halt. My
way of looking at life changed.”
Though she’d originally
planned to make her self-titled
masterpiece with Bill Bottrell, who
produced “Tuesday Night Music
Club,” he left amid acrimony over
the previous record. Crow ulti-
mately self-produced the album at
a time, she said, “when nobody
would let a woman produce their
own record, when it would be
[viewed as] crazy to waste money
on that.” She asked her friend Jeff
Trott to come to New Orleans to
write with her, and the two still
work together. Describing their
shared sensibility, Trott tells me,“We’re both optimists but with a
strong sense of reality.”
Crow recorded “Threads,“ her
first album for country power-
house Big Machine Records, at the
light-filled barn-cum-studio she
built on her wooded property. I ask
to see it, and Crow gives me a ride
on her rugged four-wheel Ranger
UTV, down a gravel road, pointing
out wild turkeys along the way. The
studio is on the top floor of the
barn; a rustic saloon sits below.
Standing near the bar, Crow
pops open a swinging door, and
suddenly a guest sticks his head in:
Her horse Bobbie Joe. The studio-
saloon is attached to the stable
where Crow’s five horses live (she’s
had as many as 22). Crow says the
horses — plus a cat, a puppy, two
turtles, the turkeys — help keep her
young sons from being subsumed
by technology. “It seems like these
devices could contribute to the de-
mise of humanity,” she says with
sage-like calm. “They’ve created
such a chasm between people and
emotion. And emotion is the gate-
way to enlightenment.”A homespun studio
The walls of Crow’s barn-studio
are lined with her some 36 guitars,
and just outside the door, an image
of Crow’s face looks up from a pho-
torealistic welcome mat above the
phrase “Keep America Growing” —
a souvenir from a Neil Young Farm
Aid benefit. Crow has herself
hosted charity events at her barn,
and the likes of Chris Stapleton
and Keith Urban have worked here.
While Musgraves and her band
were recording “Golden Hour,” one
of Crow’s sons insisted they do
something about the skunk that
had taken up residence near the
barn (it was the earthy scent of
pot). The warmly recorded
“Threads” is heavy on what could
be called protest songs. “I have
small kids, and I take some of
what’s happening in the world,
where truth is under total attack,as a personal affront,” she says.
“My venting mechanism is music.”
For “Threads,” Crow re-record-
ed her stunning antiwar country
ballad “Redemption Day” to incor-
porate posthumous vocals from
Johnny Cash, who once covered it.
She also collaborates with none
other than Public Enemy leader
Chuck D on the soulful “Story of
Everything,” calling out congress-
men who “don’t show up to work
except to give themselves a raise.”
The Nicks-featuring “Prove You
Wrong,” meanwhile, is pure resil-
ience: “The spirit of the song is the
spirit of what’s happening now,
where people are talking about
what it’s like to be a woman in the
music business, or a woman in the
world,” Crow says. “And if anyone
thinks that I can’t, let me just show
you that I can.”
Crow and I arrive at the subject
of authenticity, and particularly
women’s authenticity and why it is
still so often doubted. “It’s shock-
ing, and it’s something we have to
figure out with female political
candidates too,” she reasons. “Why
is it that when you have an opinion
and speak your truth emphatically,
it’s unappealing? A man can say
the same thing as a woman, and a
woman is ‘shrill’ or ‘overbearing.’ ”
It gives “Prove You Wrong” anoth-
er layer, another thread. “I’ve had
to fight to be treated as an equal,”
Crow continues. “That seeped into
my perspective.
“I’m not in the competitive
world of pop radio anymore, but I
feel more passionate about writing
now than I did back then,” Crow
adds with a decisive resolve, just
before gathering her kids for a
lunch with their grandma and
pops.
“Because I’m older, and I have a
deeper stake in the game as far as
what happens on this planet. When
you’re young, you look at things as
being extremely black and white.
I’m at a point where I’m looking at
the whole picture.”A troubadour for our times
[Crow, from E1]
SHERYL CROWgets the crowd going at the Newport Folk Festival last month, held at Fort Adams State Park in Rhode Island.Mike LawrieGetty ImagesPOP MUSIC