Interview 1:
John Hiatt: You have a classical background, you studied piano?
Sheryl Crow: Yes, I did.
John Hiatt: You know, I kind of hear that in the music, and not in any kind of high falootin' way, but there's a sophistication, particularly in your bridges. You write some very cool bridges.
Sheryl Crow: It's all math John, it's all math.
John Hiatt: You see, I flunked math and so...
Sheryl Crow: I never feel like I use it. I studied piano from the time I was six I guess, and got a degree in classical training and I don't even know if I can sit down and read a piece of music
anymore. It really is like a muscle and you just get so that you're not adept in thinking that way and operating on three different levels. But I loved it. I was just one of those kids that could play by ear, so I could fake my way through my lessons. I could ask the teacher, I think I know how it goes, but why don't you show me how it goes first and then she'd play it and then I'd go, okay, well I think it goes like this and then play it back to her. And she'd say,
"you're so talented, you practice so hard." But no, I took it more seriously than that. It's funny, when you get into composition class in school, all the rules of pop music are basically rules that are broken. There are no parallel thirds, no parallel fifths, no parallel fourths. I mean, all these things that pop music is based on are composition faux pas you don't want to go near, which is kind of funny and then here I am making my living breaking all the rules.
John Hiatt: Well maybe it's served you in that purpose.
Sheryl Crow: It only just brings me joy when I go back to my university because I was like snubbed. So, it's good to back back and, you know...(Sheryl waves - John laughs).
Interview 2:
John Hiatt: Let's talk a little bit about taking the reigns production-wise and getting, as you said, pretty adventurous in the studio and being willing to take those kinds of risks. What kind of effect has that had on you playing live?
Sheryl Crow: God, you know, it's really weird. I noticed on this album just stepping into the first day of rehearsals that everything was different and I don't know what it is. I do think, like you said, I think part of it is where you are in your life and how you feel about yourself and the amount of competence that you have and the amount of surrender that you at least can try to exercise. But I think part of going in and making this album and playing as much as
I did really enabled me to go out into a live setting and just be sort of more of a leader, and on this tour I literally sat down and decided exactly what I wanted the whole thing to look and feel like. You know, I used to, I'm sure you know, I mean I know a lot of people came and saw me, we were just grassroots. We threw up a couple of velvet curtains and put on some like retro clothes and that was about it. This album I was much more, in the live environment, specific about what I wanted to do and it was not just about music anymore.
John Hiatt: A little more in terms of a show and the way it was presented?
Sheryl Crow: Yeah. And so much anymore, you cannot abandon the fact that so much of everything is visual. You know, the quickness of images on TV, our attention span is so short and we are just bombarded...
John Hiatt: What did you say?
Sheryl Crow: I know. It's terrible isn't it? But so much of our creative lives now have to do with the visual part and that's why I thought, you know, I'm going to really dictate what the music is going to look like as opposed to people just being, okay, she's wearing black boots and a red top and she has long blond hair or you know, whatever which seemed to always be written about in all the reviews and stuff. And I just decided on this tour that we would bring our own images and we shot images on film, on Bolex and just all kinds of different film stock and we brought these projectors that had been devised for the kind of environment that we were going to be. For me, that was great. It was really fun because we were able to sort of create and sustain and also manipulate the mood and the music and also, you know, when
you're playing a song like "All I Want To Do" and people heard it a jillion times, for us it was just great freedom in knowing that behind us was going this great film and that I didn't have to even look like I was enjoying it.