Sheryl Crow
Everything is a lot right now, isn’t it? Even the good news—and there was quite a bit of that today. We learned about the existence of emails between Trump officials and outside advisors in which they openly discussed the fake elector scheme. Much more explosive are the revelations that Merrick Garland’s DoJ is actively investigating Donald’s actions and conversations on and around January 6th. I’m trying not to get ahead of things—it will all be resolved one way or another regardless of how much I obsess. So I’m trying to find ways to change the subject when I can. Lately that means revisiting music I haven’t listened to in a while. Enter Sheryl Crow.
Crow has been a force since the early 90s when her first album Tuesday Night Music Club came out in 1993. It wasn’t an album I listened to much. It wasn’t as good as Tori Amos’s early stuff and it wasn’t as fun or intriguing as Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville which was released the same year. The single, “All I Wanna Do,” got tons of radio play. Even though I rarely listened to the radio it was inescapable and it kind of grated on me. The only song I really liked (“Strong Enough,” today’s bonus track) felt like it belonged on a different album altogether.
Sheryl Crow’s eponymous second album was light-years beyond Tuesday Night Music Club. If there were glimpses of the potential that led to Sheryl Crow in that first album, I had missed them. The intensity, passion, and rawness are at a whole new level.
“Ordinary Woman” is, fittingly, the last track on the album (I say fittingly because it’s something of a mic drop). It starts off with the vibe of a torch song and then quickly builds to something else entirely— a searing, scathing, howl of an anthem.
“The Difficult Kind,” from Crow’s third album, The Globe Sessions, is a mournful, elegiac examination of how impossible it can be to escape another person’s old ideas about us, no matter how much we’ve changed. And how hard it can be to move beyond that loss.
Bonus Track:
You’re living in hell. We all are. But your experience is more hell-like. I can’t imagine the cacophony of thoughts & feelings, each trying to establish priority, but I can empathize. You’re always stronger than you think you are. Sending hugs & enormous karma that this is resolved in the best way possible for all of us. We’re standing by you Mary.
Mary, you keep me sane. I'm so frightened by the state of our country, I feel like I'm losing my mind. Please keep shouting your views and insights. You are brilliant, and we so need your input.