4 1GT Friday July 31 2020 | the times
cover story
I
n terms of getting the message
across, Sheryl Crow doesn’t beat
about the bush. On Woman in
the White House, the nine
Grammy award-winning,
50 million album-selling, classic
rock-reviving superstar points
out that the US could use a
president with a bit of common sense,
that after 231 years some female
representation is way overdue, and
that it is time “to clean up Capitol Hill
with a shovel and a pair of high heels’’.
All perfectly reasonable requests
after the frat boy chaos of the Trump
presidency, but it poses the question:
who exactly will this woman in the
White House be? It’s not Joe Biden.It’s not Kanye West. And it certainly
isn’t Donald Trump.
“Joe Biden is looking at several
women for his vice-presidency,” Crow
says from her ranch in Nashville,
where she lives with her adopted sons,
Wyatt, 13, and Levi, 10, and has a
studio in a barn where she made her
last three albums. “My wish is that he
chooses a woman who could lead our
country. I know Kamala Harris’s name
has been tossed around, Stacey
Abrams... women of colour. I have a
lot of hope for change.”
What about the
world-famous rapper
also briefly throwing
his hat in the ring?
“Oh my goodness,
I feel for him,” she
says of West. “We
can all conclude
that this isn’t a
serious run for the
presidency. This is
someone’s emotional
life coming apart.”
Crow is returning to
a theme that has been on
her mind for close to a
decade. Woman in the White
House first appeared in 2012, someyears before Hillary Clinton ran for
presidency. Crow felt compelled to
revive the upbeat country rocker after
believing gender relations in US
politics have actually gone backwards
since then, citing the case of the
Democratic congresswoman
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who last
week was allegedly called a “f***ing
bitch” by the Republican congressman
Ted Yoho on the steps of the US
Capitol after she suggested that
poverty drives crime.
“Considering a woman with a strong
opinion to be an effing b shows just
how far in the Dark Ages we are,”
Crow says. “It seems ridiculous, but
we still don’t have a woman in the
White House in any capacity beyond
the first lady.”
Given her 1994 hit All I Wanna Do
celebrated the joys of daytime
drinking and other irresponsible forms
of fun, Crow may not seem like the
most obvious political songwriter. The
signs, however, have always been
there. She had a pop at Trump on
2019’s Tell Me When It’s Over, and on
1996’s Redemption Day, re-recorded in
2019 as a posthumous duet with
Johnny Cash, she protested against
US indifference to the Bosnian war.
Even her 1993 debut, Tuesday Night
Music Club, which revived
classic rock in the
grunge era and sold
more than nine
million copies,All I wanna
do... is get a
woman in
the White
House
She’s sold 50 million albums, duetted
with Bob Dylan and survived cancer.
Now Sheryl Crow is getting political,
she tells Will Hodgkinson
What’s the worst
that can happen?
They can call you
a lot of names