In the Studio: Sheryl Crow Dials Up Old Friends, Protests War on Upcoming Album

Sheryl Crow's 1993 debut, Tuesday Night Music Club, was a bittersweet experience. While hits like "All I Wanna Do" pushed the album to seven-times-platinum status, Crow's friendships with the musicians she worked with — known as the Tuesday Night Music Club — fell apart amid allegations that Crow took too much credit. Epitomizing the animosity, TNMC producer Bill Bottrell called Crow "hopeless" and "obnoxious" in a 1996 Rolling Stone cover story.

So it was surprising that in August Crow dialed up Bottrell. "He said, 'I've been waiting years for this call,'" Crow says. "It was a sweet homecoming for the both of us." In a burst of creativity, they recorded twenty-four songs in forty days in the basement studio of Crow's Nashville-area home. The disc's fourteen tracks are among Crow's most personal, a fact she attributes to the adoption of her son, Wyatt, in 2007. "I couldn't write fast enough — having this tiny, innocent spirit made me fearless," she says. "I felt a sense of urgency to write about what's really happening." The album opens with the raw "God Bless This Mess," which addresses 9/11, when "the president spoke words of comfort with tears in his eyes/Then he led us as a nation into a war all based on lies." And a handful of cuts, such as "Diamond Ring" ("Diamond ring," Crow sings, "shouldn't change a thing/Fucks up everything"), seem to allude to her called-off engagement to Lance Armstrong. "All I can say is that I've been ­engaged three times," she says with a laugh. "So I have a thing about diamonds." Crow adds that the sultry R&B groove and lyrics of liberation on "Now That You're Gone" definitely don't address her ex. "That's not about Lance," she says. "I dedicate that one to Karl Rove."

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Song Stories

“Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Nirvana | 1991

"Smells Like Teen Spirit," named after a brand of deodorant marketed to girls, was Kurt Cobain's attempt to "write the ultimate pop song," he said, using the soft-loud dynamic of his favorite band, the Pixies. Cobain "had that dichotomy of punk rage and alienation," the song’s producer, Butch Vig, told Rolling Stone, "but also this vulnerable pop sensibility. In 'Teen Spirit,' a lot of that vulnerability is in the tone of his voice." Sadly, by the time of Nirvana's last U.S. tour, in late '93, Cobain was tortured by the obligation to play "Teen Spirit" every night. "There are many other songs that I have written that are as good, if not better," he claimed.

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