The New Sheryl Crow Sounds Good

Sheryl Crow’s new album Detours comes out next Tuesday and I am going to get it off of iTunes as early as humanly possible. Normally I wouldn’t care much. You see, I’ve hated Sheryl Crow’s music ever since her second album came out, but if the single is any indication, this is going to be a good album.

When Tuesday Night Music Club came out, I was totally blown away. Here was a music that expressed the bittersweet way I looked at the world. A song like Can’t Cry Anymore is incredible in the way it combines a profound sadness with a hopeful outlook and a certain amount of gallows humor. Every song on that album is a work of art as profound as a Van Gogh painting.

Nearly everything she has released since then has been complete tripe. Ms. Crow has released album after album of rehashed seventies songs that show nothing of the promise of that first album. Every time a new cd was released I would buy it thinking maybe, just maybe…. but no.  It’s depressing. I mean I don’t think about it every day or anything, but there is a tiny part of my soul that has been profoundly sad ever since I heard the opening notes of Maybe Angels. It’s not a bad song.

None of her music is bad. In fact, even her worst album (c’mon c’mon in my opinion) is actually quite good. The thing is, any schmuk could write that music. It’s all so obviously commercial that at some point it starts to sound like the fucking partridge family. I wanted to hear music that was promised by her first album.

Which is why I got so excited this morning when I downloaded her new single, love is free. Something about it just sounds both slightly less commercial and more profound at the same time. Let’s face it, Sheryl Crow could record the chicken dance and it would sell a million copies. So she doesn’t need to worry about writing “sellable” hits any more.

Let’s all keep our fingers crossed and hope that the new album lives up to the promise of the single as well as the promise of her, now fifteen year old debut.