With All I Wanna Do, Sheryl Crow crept into every chart on the planet and kicked off a career that last year celebrated three decades, a time barrier that adds to the many others she has crossed the warrior singer from Missouri, backing singer for Michael Jackson in his early years and winner of nine Grammy awards, including best rock album, one of only two women to have achieved this (the other was Alanis Morissette) .
Composer, producer and owner of her own destiny, Crow has not hesitated to break her commitment not to release any more records with the presentation of Evolution (The Valory Music Co.), nine tracks in which she reflects on the challenges of the present while evolving in the country rock sound with themes like the one that gives the album its title. “It’s about the arrival of artificial intelligence, what it will mean for our lives and everything we have to ask ourselves,” explains the artist via video conference from his home in Nashville, surrounded by guitars. In the summer he will visit Barcelona to present it at the Alma Jardins Pedralbes festival (June 24).
The silky and powerful voice of the American features in this new work a music that moves away from country rock without losing the character given to it by producer Mike Elizondo, traveling companion for the last 20 years. “I didn’t want to waste time or try to create something that looked like Sheryl Crow doing the same thing as always, it’s a record that doesn’t feel like a record from the past, but more like a record from the future.” Evolution was the first track he shared with his producer, in which he only adds the voice, unlike previous works, in which he also played the bass. “It doesn’t matter, the song is what’s important, Mike created something that I could never have done.”
This evolution breaks with the announcement made years ago by the artist that he would not release new record material. It was after publishing Threads, in 2019. “A lot of people warned me that I would regret saying it, but I felt, and I continue to feel, that records as a work, as an artistic statement, have become a dead art form People don’t listen to it in its entirety, songs are chosen and put into playlists with other musicians. That’s why I felt that this album was a wonderful closure and that I would continue to write songs and release them”. But when he came across a handful of new tracks again came the question of what to do with them: “Before I knew it, I had enough to do what I call a download of a bunch of songs that they left at the same time and they leave on the same day”.
Sheryl Crow’s twelfth studio album arrives when the artist has already blown out 60 candles. “It’s hard for me to assimilate it, I feel like I’m 36 – he says with a laugh – but the further you get away from things, the more blurred they become, it’s something I hate”. Gone is the sexual harassment she suffered from Michael Jackson’s manager, Frank diLeo, while she was a backup singer with the singer in the late 1980s. “It is interesting to see the change in recent years in these matters, it makes me feel that I live in a safer world, where if I speak I am taken seriously”. A very different situation from the response he found when he reported his case: “There was nowhere to go, the only person I asked for help, who was a lawyer, told me that I had to get over it, that I should be glad to have that promise of a job or whatever it was”.
In his case, he also had to fight with doubts about the authorship of his own themes, a problem that, in his opinion, persists in the sector. “We continue with the habit of taking for granted that any great success in a woman’s career was probably the work of a man. I remember a well-known woman said that my first album was written by men. Sometimes even women don’t stand up for other women. There is still a lot of work to be done.”
