I realize that Matt is probably going to beat me for posting this on his website because given that the sole purpose of Gigatracks is to promote and help sell the cuts of independent artists, putting an article up about a rock goddess of the mainstream could be pretty incriminating. Nevertheless, Matt is tall and lanky, has been since birth, and therefore…I think I can probably take him. So here goes…

Before I say anything else, let’s get the obvious out there. Sheryl Crow is going to have a long road ahead of her. There it is, spread out along the table like spilt gravy or a tub of Country Crock. Having not quite reached the finish line with her beau, Lance Armstrong, she is going to become very cheap fodder (or should I say streamlined expensive fodder) for the tabloids and talk shows. No doubt the relationship weight itself is crushing her and the celebrity piled on top of it will only cause her knees to bend that much more. But the thing is…for fans…there could be one small light on the other side, despite what Sheryl may or may not be running through right now.

Now what I am about to say is not meant to be taken in a cheap or tacky way (although I am pretty cheap and tacky). In fact, to preface it, let me say this: Since early 1995, I have admired Crow for her talent, her songwriting abilities and the way she carried herself, both as a celebrity and a rock star. I’ve pretty much been a fan since I heard her sing Run, Baby, Run on some late night ramble one night back in college. I had successfully ignored All I Wanna Do for several months since it was trying to run me down on every radio outlet in the South. But in the dim light of that dorm room, Run, crawled out of the television’s speaker, strolled across that ninth generation carpet of Clements Hall, and found a wayward partner in me. That was the beginning of my odyssey with Sheryl Crow. The fact that she (unlike some mainstream artists) kept trying to reach, to bend her music, to find new things, and not just stick with what I would consider completely safe material, made me even more of a fan over time. Some critics will disagree with me on that, but despite the major label, I think her albums show a definite progression in time and a strength of expressing things her way.

But this last album, Wildflower, got one spin from me. One. I never wanted to put it back in the CD player again. Crow always had that little bit of edge in her lyrics that was so catchy and so intelligent at the same time. It truly was not the same boring stuff you were getting from everyone else on radio. Crow always gave you something extra whether it was “Marilyn’s shampoo”, “I hitched a ride with a vending machine repairman” or “She was born in November 1963 the day Aldous Huxley died”. No matter if she was really talking about love or the state of the world, she expressed it in her own way. Every song sounded different. And because she really is truly a folk singer who just happens to have a big rock axe in her hands, she backed her lyrics up with some crunch, some attitude and a nice, uniquely developed wall of sound.

But Wildflower didn’t do that. It melted at the foot of the Crow goddess. No real crunch. No real spunk. It just all kind of ran together. Granted it probably meant a lot to Sheryl at the time, but it didn’t translate. It doesn’t swim the river to reach the listener on the other bank. And I always blamed that on Lance. Her love for him made her more common for the rest of us and her music went from a little bit of malice to a whole lotta love. For me, I can’t help it. I understand love, what I want is all that other stuff.

Now that Lance has decided to depart from the story of Sheryl, now that she is forced into a new phase of her life, now that there is no immediate chance for happiness, here’s hoping that the old Crow comes back to roost. And if we are lucky, with a vengeance.

The Bogtrotter