SOMETHING TO CROW ABOUT

After a broken engagement, a bout of cancer and the adoption of a child, Sheryl Crow discovers the spirit of adventure in her latest album

Detours,” says Sheryl Crow, “help you remember who you are, and they inform you as to where you’ve gotten away from yourself.” Munching on a bowl of nuts in a Boston hotel room prior to a performance at a convention last week, the 45-year-old new mom is talking about what it means to get off-track. But Crow’s strong, eclectic new album, Detours, out last Tuesday, is filled with optimism about finding a way to correct her course.

“I think hope is the big word,” she says of the album, “I don’t have any anger or bitterness or vengeful feelings about where we are as a nation or what happened to me in my personal life.”

And over the past three years, plenty has happened in her personal life in a very public way. The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter ended her engagement to Lance Armstrong, was treated for breast cancer, and adopted her son, Wyatt. Yet, she says, she came to her sense of calm by giving herself up to the “pain, sadness, confusion, and grief” of her break-up and cancer treatment, instead of diving right into her troubles as a songwriter.

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“The best way to create expansion in your life is to experience your emotions, work through them, and be done with them so it creates space for new experience and to not be constantly distracting yourself with tabloid magazines and reality TV shows and 24 hours of somebody talking about the news. When I came out of that, I felt like, ‘OK, now I’m ready to actually sit down and write.”’

And write she did, with a distance and perspective that she says “enable me to not have to be a tell-all.”

But Crow, now cancer-free, does tell plenty on Detours, including her consternation at a “war based on lies” in the tender, acoustic opener, God Bless This Mess, or starkly remembering her roiling emotions at her diagnosis on Make it Go Away (Radiation Song).

Reuniting with producer Bill Bottrell, who worked on her smash 1993 debut album, Tuesday Night Music Club, was a freeing experience for Crow. Normally a straight-ahead rock classicist, the Missouri native veers into Latin and Gypsy rhythms for the rollicking Out of Our Heads, celebrates the heartiness of New Orleans with the reggae lilt of Love Is Free, dips a toe into liquid ‘70s soul on the liberation anthem Now That You’re Gone, and even does a duet in Arabic with Ahmed Al Hirmi in Peace Be Upon Us.

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“I think for the first time on a record I didn’t get into the critical angle of ‘I can’t really do this because it’s not my style,”’ she says. “I’ve been really quick to judge myself in the harshest of ways, so this record was more of a really, really joyful adventure.”
– SARAH RODMAN (NYT)