Welcome Back, Sheryl
Welcome back, your dreams were your ticket out…
I’ll be perfectly honest in saying that I’ve not liked a single thing that Sheryl Crow has produced since 1998’s The Globe Sessions. To me, her output since that record has seemed contrived and uninspired. It could be that I’m being too hard on her. It could be that her “Soak Up the Sun” was the tune playing during my emergency wisdom tooth extraction a few years back. But all that aside, her latest single “Love is Free” seems to have captured some of that original spark. The track is the second single from Sheryl’s forthcoming Detours which features the return of Bill Bottrell (who produced Sheryl’s Tuesday Night Music Club) and is apparent in the stripped back production. Check out the video for “Love is Free”:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edTMzKB-_QU 450 400]
Detours will be released this February.
Link: Official Site | MySpace
4 Comments
SteveC
I never was a big fan of Ms Crow.
And after reading about how she was at the beginning of her career, I wrote her off completely. (see linked article, if it works…if not google “Kevin Gilbert Sheryl Crow” and look for the San Francisco Chronicle article)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1996/09/15/PK43609.DTL
Pete
Interesting article, thanks Steve. Something you tend never to think about are the stories behind careers, behind the albums. I’d be interested to hear Sheryl’s side of the story.
I saw her at the H.O.R.D.E. Festival around this time – the summer of ’94 (along w/ the Allman Bros, Blues Traveler, and ?), right when “All I Wanna Do” was blowing up.
Stevec
I really like reading about “behind the scenes” stories of musicians. I think that VH1 does a disservice when they do their biographies and whitewash everything. They tend to make things too clean and simple. Poor guy/gal rises to stardom before the inevitable fall. Yawn.
As far as Sheryl Crow is concerned, it would be interesting to hear what she would say about the article. I’ll have to do some digging this weekend to see if anyone ever dared ask her tough questions…
Jack
Hi Pete,
here’s a couple of comments about Selvin’s article from two Tuesday Night Music Club members: David Baerwald e Dan Schwartz. The source is “No fool to this game” – billboard books (2002)
David Baerwald:
“That guy should be writing for the national enquirer, or for porno movies”. Selvin came to me and said “I want to do a piece about this brilliant Bay Area Musician, Kevin Gilbert, and I said, “Yeah, you’re right. He was a brilliant fucking musician.” But then he totally misquoted everybody all over the place, including me saying, “Everybody was equal except Sheryl. She wasn’t one of us”. It made all of us sound like the biggest pricks and liars. I called him on it; I wrote him an angry letter, and that was the last I heard of it.”
Dan Schwartz:
“If this is what I think it is, The SF Chronicle article by Joel Selvin, it may help to know that in fact the quote attributed to me was never said. Joel had an agenda to promote and when I defended Sheryl’s behavior as standard aspiring celebrity behavior (i.e. “normal” for the music biz) he invented a quote to support his idea, not mine. I told him that despite Sheryl’s actions, she was no different from members of TNMC or even Linda Perry as regards taking credit for everything publicly on their “solo” records.”
“[…] don’t take that Chronicle article too seriously. It paints a far worse picture than the reality, just to sell papers. Very tabloid of Selvin to do that. Most of the “quotes” are made up including my alleged quote.”
Regards,
Jack