Sheryl. (rock star Sheryl Crow)(Interview)

Author/s: Elisabeth Shue

Overnight success? It took a decade for Sheryl Crow, who tells her friend Elisabeth Shue that she had to be her own Joan of Arc when the music business didn't want to know

ELISABETH SHUE: Interviewing my friend Sheryl Crow is about the weirdest thing I've ever had to do. Anyway, I thought I'd start by asking you about your upbringing . . .

SHERYL CROW: I'd love to say I had romantic beginnings or a hugely sordid past, but I had a close-knit family and a really normal upbringing. I have two older sisters and a younger brother, and we're all really tight. Although we lived in a small town [Kennett, Mo.] without many cosmopolitan influences, my parents were pretty artsy people. They were [big band] musicians, so I grew up with lots of people coming in and out of our house, playing music live, and that's what I thought every kid was raised with. My father was really into books and was constantly reading aloud from Pudd'nhead Wilson or whatever. We were raised in a freewheeling artistic climate and we weren't limited as far as choosing the things we wanted to do.

ES: How old were you when you first got the itch to perform?

SC: My room was a piano teacher and she started each of us kids in piano when we were about five or six. I really hated it, but I discovered I could play by ear. I can remember being about eight years old and learning "My Love" by Paul McCartney and Wings and the line "My love does it good," and my dad coming into the living room going, "Do you know what that means?" My first bit of censorship.

ES: So it wasn't like you were into performing - you were just singing naturally?

SC: No. My parents were the kind that showed you off and made you play in front of their friends. I hated performing from a very early age and I never loved it. How I wound up doing it for a living, I have no idea.

ES: I feel the same about acting. At school, I was terrified of performing or being asked about my opinions.

SC: Boy, I'll tell you, I couldn't even get through debating class. I hated that, too, and I still don't like public speaking. I can sing in front of a hundred thousand people, but public speaking for me is completely terrifying.

ES: It's interesting how we both took on a way of life that forces us to face what we are totally afraid of.

SC: I have been asked about it so much and, as you know, I have been through quite a bit of therapy -

ES: Me, too.

SC: - and I'm convinced there is some wacky preexisting condition with performers, that they're crying out for the attention or approval they didn't get when they were kids and that forces them to stand up in front of people and act out. The one great revelation I got was from sitting in the dark in the living room and playing my own little songs at the piano. As I've gotten older, I don't know if pursuing music is just a rebellious action to try to validate myself, or what. I guess if you look that far back with a predeterministic view, I was eventually going to wind up as a musician. I have this theory there is some order to all the chaos and that if you stay clear and focused and try to be a good person, you probably will wind up doing what you're supposed to be doing anyway.

ES: It's like why are you here? You're here to learn certain lessons, so you choose a path that's going to force you to learn those lessons.

SC: Yeah, I can imagine what I was last time I was here on earth - a librarian, probably.

ES: I think I was a stripper.

SC: That would've been great: Think what you'd've learned. I think I might have also been a housewife.

ES: For me, acting became a way to finally express myself as an Individual in a family in which I grew up with three brothers. Did you experience that?

SC: Absolutely. My whole young life I was trying to please my parents and I missed out on so much because I knew if I experimented I would disappoint them. So when I got to my twenties I was really mad - not at them, but because my whole life I'd tried to be a perfect kid, and when I got out into the world I didn't even know who I was anymore. I wound up gravitating toward music and started trying to write my own songs. That's where I landed after having taught school for two years.

ES: You taught school?

SC: Yeah. After I graduated [from the University of Missouri], I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was twenty years old and I got engaged to this boy, Mike, one of the guys in the band I was in at the time - I'd been in bands my whole life and my college band had been the hot-shit band on campus - and we moved to St. Louis. I took a job teaching music at an elementary school, don't ask me why, although I must say I was a good teacher. I had a couple of classrooms of autistic kids and I really liked it. I also formed a band. By then, I was getting more serious about writing my own material and discovering my own voice, out of self-preservation. One time, this young guy who had his own home studio came to see my band. He composed commercials for Budweiser and all these local big businesses, and he said he wanted me to come in and sing a McDonald's commercial. It was a regional spot, but it wound up going network and I made $42,000 for an hour's work, having made $17,000 a year as a teacher. I thought, God, if I can do this in St. Louis, I should try doing it in L.A. But that was part of my naivete.

ES: My big break was being a Burger King girl. We're like the hamburger women. [both laugh] What actually prompted you to move to L.A.?

SC: Mike had said, "If you stand up in front of the Lord and say you are going to be my wife and then you sing in bands every weekend, we're not going to make it."

ES: He said that?

SC: He did. Actually, it was a blessing, because if we'd got married one of us would've wound up dead, I'm certain. We split up. I went home on a Tuesday and told my folks I was leaving, and I headed straight out to California the Sunday after that. Drove out to L.A. in a beat up old convertible by myself and landed on the 405 [freeway] about five thirty in the afternoon right in the middle of rush hour and just cried my eyes out. Like, what am I doing here, what have I done?

ES: How did you go about getting into the music business?

SC: I had these tapes of me singing and I took them to every studio in L.A., which is exactly the wrong thing to do. My first experience with record labels was playing songs on piano by myself, which is very degrading because most people don't really know what's good.

This was the mid '80s and pop was happening for women - Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, and Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. And here I was sitting at a piano playing these songs I'd written and no one could figure out where to fit me in. So for years I kicked around L.A. playing small places by myself. Eventually this producer [Hugh Padgham] saw me play, heard a tape, and took me to A&M. They quietly signed me. There was no feeding frenzy because I had been around for a long time and people were skeptical. Then, when the record [Tuesday Night Music Club, Crow's 1993 debut album] took off, every label scrambled to sign female artists. People say to me all the time, "Isn't it great what's happening for women in music?" Part of me says yes to that, but Joan Osborne and myself had been doing this for so long, it would have been nice if people had been open-minded to us fifteen years ago.

ES: Going back to what you were saying about driving around with your tapes, isn't it incredible how naive and innocent we all were, imagining how we'd make things happen for ourselves?

SC: My naivete is the thing that saves me, I swear. I had no preconceived notions about what was going to happen, but I knew the possibilities were wide open and that something great could happen. It never occurred to me it wouldn't.

ES: I find that the older you get, the real struggle is how to reclaim your Innocence.

SC: You know, after I toured Tuesday Night Music Club for two and a half years I felt like so much of my innocence was gone and that so much of my life was about being defensive. Now, with my latest record [Sheryl Crow, 1996], it feels so different because I've not been bombarded by the press. You can turn your mind around if you really focus on the things you love. It took me so long to learn that.

ES: Each of us, besides growing up wanting to please our families, came into a profession where there's so much Judgment and criticism, which can make us forget to connect to what we want, what's important to us, as opposed to what's important to them out there.

SC: Do you think therapy can help you get rid of that need to always be right with others?

ES: It shifts. I always try to acknowledge to myself that I still feel those feelings, but I try not to surrender to them. It's worse when you deny you care what people think, because then you get really crazy. What are the moments when you feel the most joy?

SC: I'm still learning as I go. John Lennon said that life is what happens when you are making plans, and that is really how I've always lived my life. I've always been working toward something or I've always been scrutinizing something I have already done, and now I find the easiest moments in my life are when I am sitting quietly. On stage, I used to be aware of trying to make the music sound great and in line with the integrity of the recordings. Now, the best moments are when I have a really rotten day and I take that out onstage with me and put all that emotion into the performance. Some of the best shows I've given this year have been when I've been tired or my personal life has been getting me down. You bring it all out and people connect with whatever that energy is, whether it's freedom or sadness, or whatever. That's been an enlightening experience for me in the last couple of years.

ES: That's because you're sharing it. When I'm acting I'm sharing, but I'm sharing my own little world - and when, months later, the audience sits in the dark and watches, you just hope they'll have some feelings about what you shared with them. It must be electrifying to share your feelings with an audience immediately, as you do when you perform.

SC: It depends. Sometimes I'll decide the entire audience is bored and then I want to get offstage. When I was a kid, I remember reading this interview with Eric Clapton, who was talking about performing in Cream and how it was just these three guys up onstage jamming free-form, just playing to each other. Their perception of the audience was that it was there to look in on a happening, a scene. It makes me think my job is not to go out there and be like a circus act.

ES: Maybe it should be about experiencing the performance for yourself and through that to naturally share it with people. While you're on stage and experiencing your music, does your mind fuck with you and judge you?

SC: You can't imagine what will run through your mind when you're onstage sometimes - like I will think about a pair of pants I need to hem, just ridiculous stuff. We've had some incredible nights on this tour and I feel blessed by some of the incredible experiences we've had, but you do get nights - last night, for example, even though the audience was really into it - when you think you're crap. You hear that voice you've had since childhood that says you are not worth shit. And you think that voice is screaming over all the music and out of the amplifiers, until eventually it wins and you are crap. And you think, I don't want to do this anymore, but then you get up the next day and walk out onstage hoping to hit those moments where everything is transporting you and you're transporting the audience.

ES: I deal with that self-doubt thing in therapy all the time.

SC: So do I. My poor therapist - though I'm sure I put all six of his kids through college.

ES: I know, but isn't it a lifesaver? I couldn't imagine surviving in this world without it.

SC: The first time I went, I had just gone through this extremely long stretch of chronic depression and days of never getting dressed, never leaving my house, almost being agoraphobic. Eventually, my mom threatened to come out to L.A., and I thought, "Well, I can't have that." So I started going to therapy. I can't recommend highly enough that people find out who they are so they can really experience their lives.

ES: How has it affected your music?

SC: When I perform - I'm sure you do this, too - I think about all the people that are going to see me, so I don't want to do anything offensive, or I worry that someone is going to know I've written about them in a song. For that reason, it took my morn a while to love my first record, but in the end she was able to see some individuality in it. With therapy, though, I was able to take off that coat and run around naked for a while.

ES: Are you close to your parents?

SC: I talk to them all the time. I am a lot like my dad, who is very intense. Both my parents are extremely spiritual and they are truly the people I'm closest to in my life - along with my sisters and brother. Otherwise, I don't have a lot of people around me. I don't have a lot of friends at any one time. My parents have always been my refuge, which also makes things complicated because you never get out of that dynamic of being somebody's daughter.

My mom has been a really good case study for me because she had a pretty bad upbringing watching her father beat up her mom. Her parents were divorced early, and she had polio when she was young. But she has always had this empathetic manner about her, very loving and affectionate. Some people wind up that way and others have the capacity for bitterness or anger. She always says, "You just do the best you can in life. But everyone makes mistakes, everyone is human." It all happens so fast, though, doesn't it? I can't believe I'm already thirty-five. Oh God.

ES: Did you have any inkling you would become a major rock star?

SC: I can't even think that way; it overwhelms me. All I wanted to do was be like the people in those black and white photos I saw in Rolling Stone when I was a kid: people like Clapton and Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger.

ES: If you'd made It straightaway do you think your lifo would be different now?

SC: As an excuse, I've always said if I'd made it by twenty I would have petered out or imploded or lost my mind, but I'm not sure I would have because what I'm doing now is not too much of a departure from what I was doing then.

ES: I had six yearn when I was playing one-dimensional girlfriend parts and feeling like a complete loser. I've finally been able to get better opportunities. But I look back at that time and I thank God I went through it because It shaped my ability to want to express myself for myself, not for other people. Do you feel that when you look back at your yearn es a backup singer?

SC: My whole experience as a backup singer [for Michael Jackson, Sinead O'Connor, Stevie Wonder, and others] was exactly that. I constantly felt, Wait, this isn't who I am. I want to be doing my own thing and it's degrading to be standing here dancing around in a really tight black dress.

But you end up having to defend those periods of your life. Like you, I look at an experience like that as being a crucial part of the sequence of my life. I was a smalltown girl from Missouri and singing backup introduced me to a whole different world - as well as the world itself. As distasteful as some of it might have been, it formulated who I eventually became. My heart went out to Alanis Morissette when the backlash against her began, having been a child star and a disco queen or whatever. That was her life and she is who she is now because of that.

ES: How do you find peace on the road?

SC: I'm having a hard time with that now. We've been going at a breakneck pace, and I asked for it - I wanted to play six nights a week because I didn't want to tour for two and a half years like I did with my first record. I'm still enjoying the band, but you get to a point where you can see no further than sleeping till noon, having four hours to hang out, and then doing the show. It becomes such a big blur you can't figure out where life enters into it, and then it's really hard to find those moments of peace. The idea of sitting down and facing yourself sometimes seems like more work than just sleeping all the time and living at night in the dark, which makes you feel like a vampire. I'm at that point now where I have to figure out a way of dealing with this. There used to be a time when I'd get wildly trashed to blow out the cobwebs. But I don't enjoy that anymore. I can't spring back as quickly as I used to, so I'm taking better care of myself.

ES: The one thing I do to relax when I'm making a film Is to play the guitar in my trailer.

SC: I remember you telling me. You have a four-track recorder, right?

ES: Yeah, I do. Oh, but my songs am so odd. But you told me that what you love most Is writing your songs and singing them for yourself ...

SC: That's one of the beautiful things about music. There is nothing that compares to having a voice, and I would rather sit in my bedroom and play and sing than go out and share it with an audience, because sometimes it's too personal to do that.

ES: O.K. I'll ask you a few general questions and then I'll let you go find some peace.

SC: This is probably the most exciting moment of my day here. I'm sitting in Cleveland and it's completely ugly and our hotel is connected to a mall. That's when you know you're in the beautiful heart of America.

ES: How many days are you there?

SC: Only tonight. We get up in the morning, get off the bus, go into a hotel, sleep for five hours, do the show, check out and drive all night. I'm in that mode now where I'm wearing the same clothes everyday, carrying around twenty pairs of underwear in an over-the-shoulder bag.

ES: Good Idea. Interview wanted me to ask if you thought your first album was kind of open and Innocent ...

SC: Yeah, especially when I was throwing up tequila in the bathroom at 4:30 A.M.

ES: [laughs] Your second album showed a different you, didn't It?

SC: It was raw and rough around the edges and had a sense of abandonment, a take-it-or-leave-it attitude, which is exactly how I felt when I made it. If you make a record honestly, it is merely a snapshot of who you are while you're recording it.

ES: Where do you think you'll go next?

SC: Who knows? When I go to record at the end of this year, I don't exactly know how I'll be feeling. I don't know if I'll still be trying to exercise some levity in my life, if I'm going to make a middle-age record, or one that's even more youthful and in your face than the last one. The only responsibility I feel is to capture who I am, honestly, and not be conscious of public opinion and political correctness and all that stuff.

ES: When we talked yesterday, you said you were finally enjoying yourself to an extent that you hadn't before. It made me feel happy to hear you say that.

SC: I feel at this point in my life, Lisa, that I've walked through a heavy curtain and I'm now standing in a different room and able to see things a little more clearly. Part of that has to do with controlling how much press I do and then not reading everything that's written about me. Putting on those blinders has allowed me to get into my music again and I'm really enjoying that. I'm remembering the early days of straggling when nobody knew who I was and I had to be my own Joan of Arc. There is a lovely innocence to that.

ES: What scares you the most about your life?

SC: Right now, it's not being able to balance my career and my personal life. I don't want to get to the point where I look back and think, Well, I never had kids and never had a family. The flip side of that is that I have loved deeply in my life and I would never have forsaken my experiences with those people. And I count myself lucky to be able to go around and play music. It's a luxury and an overwhelming blessing. And it's my life.