Sheryl Crow was never cool. A former high–school music teacher, she thigh-slapped her way into pop consciousness in 1993 with Tuesday Night Music Club, a collection of carefree, daytime drinking jams, and was almost immediately embraced by her heroes – the Eagles, Stevie Nicks, Johnny Cash.
But just like Fiona Apple, Jewel and the rest of the 90s female singer-songwriters stringing out bad-boyfriend anecdotes into angsty radio anthems, Crow never really felt part of the alt-rock scene. “I came up with Smashing Pumpkins, Beck, Hole, REM,” she recalls, delicately criss-crossed in a stiff armchair. “But I was totally shunned. I always felt like I was in no man’s land. I’d go to the Grammys” – for the record, she won three – “but I was never ‘in’ with the popular kids, do you know what I mean?”
We’re sitting in one of the nooks of Crow’s Nashville home, a ranch that comes with staff and is accented in both shabby rock-star bohemia and American gothic. Out back is a barn that has doubled as a music studio for her 11th and final album, Threads, an all-star blowout featuring Keith Richards, Mavis Staples, Chuck D and St Vincent. Being snubbed by Billy Corgan can’t rank too high on the list of life worries, can it?
“Well, instead, I got swept up by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. It was weird, like hanging out with my parents’ friends.” She lets out an awkward laugh. “I mean that in the best possible way, because clearly they were the people I wanted to hang out with, but it definitely did feel like, when that Seattle scene was coming up, even the record labels were trying to figure out a way to make me appear alternative.”
They needn’t have bothered. It’s worth being reminded that Crow has sold 50m albums worldwide; her debut went platinum – twice in the UK and seven times in the US. She has survived the triple trauma of breast cancer, a brain tumour and an engagement to Lance Armstrong (they split in 2006, a few weeks before their wedding). Meanwhile, her brand of soupy, country-tinged rock, all white wine and leather trousers, has inevitably come back round to see her booked at both Wembley and Glastonbury this summer, playing in front of fresh new fans.
“There are very few women who can pull in the young people – one of the many things that’s unfair in my industry is that men can go on stage and play to young women when they’re 60 and it’s still considered sexy.” Crow, on the other hand, considers herself “a heritage artist” now. It’s not that she’s stopped caring about how she looks – that remains an ever-present, low-level nag at the back of her mind – more that she’s decided she’s free of the insecurity and competitiveness and career reinventions.
“But back [in the 90s], when you were trying to be an artist you were playing out who you were supposed to be in front of everyone.” Crow pivoted from mistress of pop-rock to bluesy folk singer and even had a spell in 2013 as a demure country belle – “I would say thank you, next, on that [phase]” she laughs. “I don’t know how many artists go through [that] today because they seem so much more aware of their brand.”
In her sixth decade, as a mother of two sons under 12, Crow doesn’t think her life really got going until her late 40s. “It’s stifling, because you still have so much more to say and you’re growing and you’re interested. I don’t know where I fit in – it’s one of the reasons why this is going to be my last album.”
For someone announcing her exit from the industry, she’s remarkably zen. It’s the same attitude she applies to the talent squashed and spat out by the music industry over the years, by powerful men taking advantage of young, vulnerable stars.
“I’ve been through some really painful experiences and sexual harassment, so I have been through it. But I’ve never had any apologies and I will say that karma is a mean mamma – and that she seems to get even.” Crow won’t mention any names and writes much of this off as behaviour that emerging artists have long been expected to shut up about and endure – which until recently it was. Does she not get angry looking back?
“I wouldn’t wish anyone ill,” she says, softly, “but me getting an apology now, from someone who doesn’t mean it, doesn’t matter to me.”
Which brings us to what is now another problematic period in her life: the almost two years Crow spent as a backing singer on Michael Jackson’s Bad Tour, 1987-89. It was a gig Crow landed a couple of years out of graduating from college while she was teaching and making music for TV adverts. It saw her duetting with Jackson on I Just Can’t Stop Loving You, night after night, on a run of shows since alleged by the documentary Leaving Neverland to have enabled accounts of sexual abuse on Jackson’s part.
Crow pauses. “I happened to turn on CNN the morning after the first half [of the documentary] aired, and they showed clips of the young man who was on the Jackson tour with us and it made me … I mean, I still feel really … ”
Crow grasps for the right weight of words. “It’s like a death in the family, you know? It’s sad. [James Safechuck] was a great kid and the whole time he was with us – which was the better half of an 18-month tour – I always wondered: ‘What in the world are his parents doing?’, you know?”
We sit in an uncomfortable gloom. Did she guess? Did she wonder? “Honestly, I think … ” She takes a longer pause. “I think that there were a lot of exceptions made because of the damage that [Jackson] … I mean, he didn’t intentionally project it, but it was part of his aura – this almost being untouchable and almost alien-like [figure]. And, yeah, I mean, I’m sad, and I’m mad at a lot of people. I feel like there was just a huge network of people that allowed all that to go on. It’s just tragic.”
It is a shocking statement – a world-famous rock star laying out charges against the music industry for being complicit in Michael Jackson’s alleged abuse of young boys. Crow looks pained. “I think he actually did not know my name for quite a long while.” She describes an atmosphere in which Jackson’s orbit centred entirely round him, leaving her and her bandmates significantly out of picture. Was there never any contact from Jackson once she’d made it as a bona fide solo star?
“Never. I saw him at the Grammys and I don’t think he ever put together [who I was].”
To say all this is awkward, sitting in Sheryl Crow’s house, drinking Sheryl Crow’s specially bought English breakfast tea, is an understatement. But we move on to her kids, about them keeping her young and forcing her to listen to Post Malone – the ways in which she feels the world is slowly spinning towards a better place. She remains thoughtful on how much has changed for her as an artist, and the good that a whole lot of life, therapy and healthy living can do.
“I will say that I feel more like the person I came in as, now more then I ever did,” she says. “And part of that is, when you’re living out your life in the public eye and you’re struggling between ‘who and how do I need to become to keep people interested in me?’, you don’t necessarily cling to who you are. And I don’t have that nervous energy like I did in the 90s of second-guessing myself.”
What would she say to her younger, more tightly coiled self?
“I think if you’re always trying to keep things in check like I was … When it started to spin out of control and unwind, that was really the first time I was forced to feel a true emotion and hold it until it was gone. And we don’t do that enough. You’ve got to experience everything in [pain] so you will come out of the other side stronger and more aware.”
This sounds like the start of a Sheryl Crow song. She smiles.
“The only way to the other side is go through it, you know?”
Threads is released on Friday 30 August
