One track that didn’t make the cut for Sheryl Crow is a killer B-side called “Free Man.” Structured like a country song but bashed out like a scrappy garage band, it tells a story of a woman who hitches her wagon to a free-thinking, self-styled anarchist. She’s momentarily entranced until her casual observations start to form a larger picture. His friends seem a little off; he’s teaching her how to shoot a gun. Soon, she’s cooking for him, mothering him, sitting shotgun while he goes off on a racist rant. It all concludes with a punchline as she files for divorce: “I’d appreciate a little bit of government!”
Crow never ended up starting her own label, but she did start operating her own recording studio out of her Nashville home, where, among others, Kacey Musgraves booked some time to work on 2018’s Golden Hour. For someone who had spent a rollercoaster decade playing by the industry’s rules and wrestling, over and over again, with its ugly power dynamics, the splendid, isolated comfort of a recording studio seems a better fit, anyway.
On Sheryl Crow, you can hear her settle into this eventual legacy behind the boards, searching until she finds just the right sound. In the liner notes, Crow, who worked as a music teacher before she left Missouri for California, is credited with playing acoustic, electric, and bass guitar, along with Moog bass, harmonium, keyboards, Hammond organ, Wurlitzer, a Penny-Owsley piano, and loops. Deep within the buzz and clatter of these masterfully written songs, you can hear an even more elusive quality that makes them stick: an artist having fun. “There was a huge spectrum of emotions that went along with that record,” Crow recalled to Rolling Stone last year. “One of being burned out, two of being misunderstood… and very underestimated. But also euphoric: The euphoria of feeling like, ‘Well, nobody believes I can do anything anyway. So I’m going to do what I want to do.”
Later in the Charlie Rose interview, Crow performs “Home,” the best song on Sheryl Crow and one of three on the tracklist without a co-writer. She tells Rose it was the only one that arrived to her “on the mic,” claiming the whole thing came together in just 10 minutes. (“That’s probably why I still have a certain affinity for that song,” she says, cracking a smile.) The recording backs up her memory of this impromptu bolt of inspiration. It fades in and out, as if we are receiving a transmission of just the most crucial bit of a long, ongoing investigation.
At first blush, it might sound like a love song. “I woke up this morning and now I understand/What it means to give your life to just one man,” Crow begins. “This is home,” goes the chorus. Every detail, however, tugs at the sense of certainty in those words. The music sways and swells, in a cosmic country kind of way, as she traces a path from her teen years to the present day, her fantasies of wandering the world to the suffocating rooms where she now looks into the eyes of someone she used to love. Meanwhile, she measures the distance between their two breaking hearts: “Mine,” she observes, “is full of questions.” This may be where the relationship ends, she acknowledges. But it’s also the precise moment where any good story begins.
