Sheryl Crow was born in Kennett, Missouri, across the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tennessee. Her parents, Bernice and Wendell Crow, played piano and trumpet with a jazz band, and they taught her to understand music. She had piano lessons from when she was five. She could play songs by ear at six. She composed her first song at the age of 13. "I was one of those kids who danced in my own bedroom and spun my own 45s and imagined I was someone else." Who, Britain's Q magazine asked. "Christine McVie! I was a big fan of hers. And Elton John..." In her teens and early twenties, she read a lot, and she learned as much from those writers as she did from songwriting idols of hers, like Bob Dylan and Tom Waits.
She went to University of Missouri in Columbia, where she majored in music composition, performance, and teaching. She taught music classes to elementary school kids with special needs in St. Louis for a few years, before moving to Los Angeles in 1986 and trying to make it big in the recording industry. She knew no one in Los Angeles, but viewed it as an escape from the conservative, restrained world of Missouri, where she was in a "terrible relationship." "It wasn't frightening because I didn't have anything to lose," she says of the experience.
Success was not immediate for Ms. Crow. But it wasn't like she experienced abject failure either. At a recording session for a television commercial she was singing on, she overheard someone talking about upcoming auditions for a Michael Jackson tour. "It was supposed to be on recommendation only, but I just showed up. They were videoing everyone, so I just said, Hi, Mike! I'm Sheryl from Missouri. I'd sure like to go on the road with you. And that was it. They sent the video to him and he saw it, called me back the next day, I sang, and I got it. He must have looked at me and thought, Ah, she looks completely harmless; she looks like she just got in off a truck out of the country or something..." The National Enquirer believed something else went on: "Michael Jackson's Secret Girlfriend," read the tabloid's headline. The paper also went as far as to claim that she bore Michael's baby. She was a back-up singer on the Bad World Tour, and toured with him for the entire two year run.
Her songs were recorded by such artists as Eric Clapton, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, and Wynnona Judd. She sang back-up on recordings by Don Henley, Foreigner, Stevie Wonder, Rod Stewart, and Sting. She appears in one of Henley's videos. And she toured with a number of bands and artists, from Michael Jackson to Bob Dylan (the 30th Anniversary Celebration at Madison Square Garden) to Foreigner.
Don Henley finally gave Sheryl a clue about where her future lay: "Don was the one who said, You should quit letting your songs go to other artists and do your own thing, and that means quit doing any back-up work. So that's what I did. And for the next two years, I sat around, going, Hmmm, now what do I do? I'm starving!"
She was pretty depressed. She spent a few years writing songs, with no record contract in sight. She was so depressed she could barely get out of bed for a six-month period. But she was "jumpstarted" out of it by therapy and antidepressants. That's when she was first invited to join the Tuesday Night Music Club.
She had recorded a first album with Sting's producer Hugh Padgham, who had been responsible for giving the demo tape that got Crow signed to A&M Records in the first place. They liked each other, but there was no bite to the music they produced. She says the music was 'too mature.' The label agreed to scrap the album, despite their $250,000 investment in it. It has since been released as Sheryl Crow to mediocre reviews which basically said: she made the right choice. She began to work with Bill Bottrell, who was coming off a series of also-scrapped Michael Jackson sessions.
Bill Bottrell, a producer who had worked with Thomas Dolby among others, used to get a bunch of other L.A. songwriters together for semi-drunken brainstorming, songwriting, and jam sessions on Tuesday nights. Others in the group were David Baerwald and David Ricketts, who are known better as David + David (they had a hit with their 1986 song "Welcome to the Boomtown"), Kevin Gilbert, and Brian McLeod (who has played with Wire Train and Tears for Fears).
"Bill [Bottrell] has this huge, old warehouse with old couches and tapestries on the wall, and right in the middle of the room was this board... We'd show up, drink, smoke, party, play and write until the wee hours of the morning. It had the vibe of a good night at the bar mixed with a group therapy session where we would challenge each other to go a step further, deeper, better. Our object was to finish a song before we went home. It was a very special way to work. The first night I was there, we wrote 'Leaving Las Vegas.'"
No one was allowed to bring songs or scraps of songs to the evenings. Nobody owned the material. They co-wrote everything. A few of the songs were written on election night 1992, as Bill Clinton was elected to office, with the TV plugged into the mixing board. Some songs made it onto the album from their early recordings at the Tuesday Night Music Club. The atmosphere made it easy to try songs, and sounds, out.
"I realized about halfway through making this that we'd made a country-flavored record. I had brought in the records that influenced me the most- Let It Bleed, Derek and the Dominoes, Dylan's Nashville records- and the one thing that runs through all of them is that they're very country influenced. When we figured that out, we celebrated: we rented Coal Miner's Daughter, and I made all this fried chicken... country has always had a profound impact on rock."
The themes in her songs are varied, but almost always deal with real, if somewhat damaged people. "Scrappers" and "misfits" "the people I grew up with" Her interest in unusual characters is also rooted in a childhood fascination with Mark Twain, started when her father gave her a copy of Pudd'nhead Wilson.
The song "What I Can Do For You" deals with sexual harassment, from a point of view that Sheryl knows well. It deals with a music industry mogul who indicates that there's an easy way to make it in show business. Her experiences with this behavior have made her vocal about this issue. At a show in Austin, Texas, she addressed the audience with the unusual question "Do we have any sexual harassers in the audience tonight?" Upon hearing a group of beer-inspired grunts and whistles, she turned to them. "You suck," she said. Then she began to sing.
The album came out to stunning reviews. It was called anything from "an instant and lasting joy" to "one of the truly great debut albums." Time Magazine picked up on her lyrics: "Her sound may be reminiscent of Bonnie Raitt but her soul is pure slacker. 'You go through a weird period in your early 20s where you lose your sense of humor... I've got mine back."
She did months of touring, with as disparate artists as John Hiatt, Crowded House, Big Head Todd, and the Eagles, as well as festivals like the H.O.R.D.E. tour, and Woodstock '94, which finally broke her nationally.
Since Woodstock, Crow's career has been at breakneck pace. She's sung herself into hoarseness a number of times, and once suspected she had anemia. But she's continued with her round of interviews, shows and touring.
Others have picked up the Crow bug as well. At VH1's Fairway to Heaven golf tournament, Bill Murray sang "All I Wanna Do." Liz Phair named TNMC one of her favorite albums of the year. And Entertainment Weekly named her their 1994 Rookie of the Year. Sheryl sang two songs with Mick Jagger on the Stones' recent pay-per-view concert special.
She also played a show for a few hundred people at the VH1 cafeteria last year. "VH1 was fun," She told Details magazine. "It's the unusual stuff I enjoy now." But she won't be branching out of music quite yet. "I've had tons of acting offers," she told EW, "But for me to blow my credibility as a musician by displaying how horrible an actress I can be would not be too intelligent."
She was nominated for five Grammys this year, and won three. She won three, for Best New Artist, Female Pop Vocal, and Record of the Year (for "All I Wanna Do"). She performed on the show.
Since then, she's performed at the opening of the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, a gig she shared with the Eagles. She also had a track on the tribute to the Carpenters, I Wish I Were a Carpenter. The first song she ever learned on piano was the Carpenters' "Bless the Beasts and Children."