Exclusive: Sheryl Crow Talks About How Michael Jackson and Don Henley Shaped Her Style
The singer looks back on the long road to becoming the performer she is today.
Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty
It’s been 24 years since Sheryl Crow released her breakthrough debut, Tuesday Night Music Club, with hits like “All I Wanna Do” and “Strong Enough” vaulting her onto main stages almost overnight. But Crow’s career as a performer stretches back well before 1993, to her days fronting a college cover band, to stints singing backup for Michael Jackson, Don Henley and others. And it has outlived most of her contemporaries, thanks to her perseverance and ever-evolving songwriting and performing skills. With her new album, Be Myself, released last month, Crow is on the road yet again this summer, with stops this week in New York City followed by a slot on Willie Nelson’s traveling Outlaw Music Festival.
Crow spoke with Paste recently about growing into a consummate performer, from the lessons she learned when she was starting out to respecting your audience to her shifting sense of makes a great live show.
Paste: What do you consider to be your first significant live performance?
Crow: I took over for a girl singer, a lead singer of a band in college, and it was a really popular band. I had been the keyboard player and she quit and I got thrust into the frontperson role and that was the first time I’d ever seen myself as a frontperson. So here we are playing at the most popular bar in college and I’m filling in for the girl that everyone is used to. It was terrifying, but by the end of the night it was a blast. That, actually for me was a little bit of turning the corner, of getting out from behind my keyboard, where I was very comfortable. I didn’t really know what that was going to mean or where it was going to lead me.
“I feel bad for kids now who go on a TV show and immediately have 30 million people that are pre-ordering their record that isn’t even made and they haven’t had an opportunity to figure out who they are or who they want to be onstage.”
Paste: Could you see the writing on the wall even then?
Crow: Obviously in college, you’re not really even thinking that far in advance. At the time I was getting my degree in classical piano but I knew that I wanted to write songs and get my songs heard because I believed I was the right person to sing them. It took a while for it to become obvious because people started cutting my songs before I did and it was Don Henley that ultimately said, “Look, you’ve got to quit giving your songs away and you need to record them yourself.” At that moment I wasn’t thinking, “I’m going to springboard from this cover band into the world of being a recording artist-slash-rock star.” I just was following the course in front of me.
Paste: Did cutting your teeth in front of very small crowds teach you lessons you still employ on tour all these years later?
Crow: Absolutely. I feel bad for kids now who go on a TV show and immediately have 30 million people that are pre-ordering their record that isn’t even made and they haven’t had an opportunity to figure out who they are or who they want to be onstage. It takes a while to figure it out. It takes a lot of mistakes and I had the luxury of working out all the kinks without the annoyance of YouTube and cell phones and all that. Clearly, I’ve been around longer than social media has so I really got to hone my craft in front of small audiences. The audiences got bigger and I along the way got more professional and more clear about who I wanted to be and how I wanted to be and what I wanted to be. I got to do that in the shadows of touring and the exercise of playing live many nights in a row for many months.
Paste: Were there any standout shows early on that you now consider impactful to your career?
Crow: The big standout for me was in 1999, I believe it was. I played at Woodstock, the second one, and that changed the trajectory of my career overnight. The exposure of that and how people began to see me really shifted from that one gig. It put me on the map and from that moment on I was able to play much bigger places, and now you don’t really get those opportunities that often to really change things overnight without social media. You can do a lot of things on social media and millions of people can see it, but back then, there wasn’t that. It was word of mouth, and what happens with word of mouth is you create a really loyal fan base of people that were there way back when before anybody knew you and they discovered you and they told everybody else about you.