For so many years now, Sheryl Crow has played the fierce or forlorn but always-intuitive narrator in a dearth of some of her most beloved songs. But in recent years, while undertaking what she’s come to view as perhaps her most personal projects yet, the rocker unintentionally found herself crafting her own story on wax. “It’s basically a history of my life,” Crow said of her forthcoming new studio album “Threads,” for which the Grammy-winning artist wrote and recorded with so many of the iconic musicians who’ve colored her musical palette, including, among others, Stevie Nicks, Mavis Staples, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Willie Nelson, and James Taylor.
“This album is basically tracing my history all the way back to being a little kid and poring over albums,” Crow said of the star-studded “Threads” when calling from a tour stop in Glasgow. “I was that geeky kid that found myself in music and dreamed of being onstage with people like Stevie Nicks and James Taylor and certainly the Rolling Stones.
“This record didn’t start out as a project of ‘Let’s see how many people we can get on it,'” she added of the LP, set for release on Aug. 30 via Big Machine Records. “It was more just a project of love. Of wanting to create moments and of sharing music with others… which I think for all of the people on this record is an authentic desire.”
In addition to having spent considerable time in the studio for “Threads,” Crow, who plays the Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre on Thursday with Heart, said in the past decade she’s felt particularly rejuvenated in her ability as a live performer. “I just feel extremely grateful to still be able to do it and to go out and play a pretty full show of songs that people know and remember,” she said. “I think having gratitude and still feeling connected to playing live is what makes us still want to do what we’re doing.” To that end, the 57-year old has recently made her home on the road: when we spoke, Crow had just wrapped up a set of dates opening stadiums for Phil Collins and the Eagles, respectively, and in a few days she’d be taking the stage at the Glastonbury Festival.
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Still, hearing Crow speak about “Threads,” you sense the experience extended beyond her career. No, this was a personally fulfilling and even life-changing one. “In reflection I have a very emotional feeling about it,” she said of the 17-track LP assembled over roughly a three-year period alongside executive-producer Steve Jordan. “I wanted to make that connection with the people that brought me to where I am now. I’m very proud and my precious of my influences and I like to remind myself of what it means to be a writer and a musician and a songwriter and a performer. These people have set all of us on a course.”
As Crow explained, the genesis of the album stemmed from her recording with Kris Kristofferson who she calls “a monumental figure in my life — just a great songwriter and a great man and a great friend.” Witnessing him suffering from dementia she became impassioned to catalog her own musical influences – and create with them – while she was still able to. “It just really was an emotional moment for me after we recorded together realizing that this is our history,” she recalled of that session with Kristofferson. “Our whole history is documented in our art. And by these people who gave us an understanding of the collective experience.”
Crow didn’t exclusively look to the past on “Threads”: several songs on the album see the singer-songwriter dueting with some of contemporary music’s most vital young artists, from Gary Clark Jr. to Jason Isbell and Maren Morris to Brandi Carlile and Margo Price.
“These are all people that are carrying on the tradition of making music like the artists that inspired me,” Crow said. Specifically, working alongside young female artists, Crow said, is of particular importance to her. She singled out Morris, who sings with her and Nicks on the fiery “Prove You Wrong,” as a young female artist she has mentored, though she noted that concept of female musicians empowering others has a rich history. To that end, Crow referenced the traveling Lilith Fair festival, in 1997, and how its founder Sarah McLachlan “basically put that tour together to prove a point: that promoters were wrong. All the promoters up to that point were saying you couldn’t have more than one female on a bill because it wouldn’t sell tickets. Sarah basically defied that by putting an all-female bill of women who were making all different kinds of music and were extremely vital to the music scene.”
To Crow, female artists in today’s music business sadly are still fighting similar battles. “But as long as women are battling for other young women by taking out not only female openers but also filling their tours with women behind the scenes, inch by inch we’re pushing ourselves incrementally forward.”
When it comes to contemporary music, though – and specifically pop radio fare – Crow has admittedly mixed feelings. “A concern for me is the idea that songs are now being written tailor-made to the six-second attention span,” she said. “You have 15 people writing on one song to make sure that whoever’s listening doesn’t go over to the next song in six seconds. And that doesn’t make for the best songwriting nor does it make for songs that have meaning. Now more than ever music is about commerce and where commerce and art meet you don’t necessarily get a fair representation of everything.
“But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t great songwriting out there. I do have a lot of hope. I think there’s great young artists out there who sadly won’t get the big radio play but will be around for as long as my kids are listening to music. And it’s the staying power that ultimately winds up mattering.”
Dan Hyman is a freelance writer.
ctc-arts@chicagotribune.com
When: 7 p.m., Thursday (w/Heart and Lucie Silvas)
Where: Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, 19100 Ridgeland Ave., Tinley Park
Tickets: $22-$658; 708-614-1616 or www.tinleyparkamphitheater.com
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