Sheryl Crow

There's something about Sheryl Crow that makes men—even innocent men—feel guilty. For those who are guilty, namely the men who have done Crow dirt in past relationships, the "something" is clear whenever she launches into one of her impeccably crafted songs about male shortcomings: This song is about you, loser. What's more, exacting payback has been sweet for the 37-year-old Crow. Two of her three albums have gone multiplatinum, and she's nabbed six Grammys along the way, including Best New Artist and Record of the Year. Even Hollywood has taken notice—Crow contributed the theme song for the Bond flick Tomorrow Never Dies and a cover of the Guns n' Roses song Sweet Child o' Mine for Adam Sandler's Big Daddy. And she's not just singing in Tinseltown—she plays a junkie opposite boyfriend Owen Wilson in The Minus Man.

Few predicted such noteworthiness for the stringy-haired former music teacher from Missouri who broke out in 1994 with (continued on page 180)Sheryl Crow(continued from page 115) the bluesy pop tune All I Wanna Do, in which Crow professes the simple desire to "have some fun until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard." But her vulnerability and understated beauty have made her one of rock's most desirable women, and subsequent hit singles such as If It Makes You Happy, A Change (Would Do You Good), My Favorite Mistake and Anything but Down demonstrate that what's really on her mind is anything but fun and games. Many have speculated that Crow's most trenchant songs are directed at her ex-lovers, including Eric Clapton. While she doesn't kiss and tell, Sheryl confessed to writer Mark Ribowsky that her alternately scathing and plaintive songs are a mirror of her never-ending angst about life and love.

[Q] Playboy: It seems that men to a large degree have inspired you to turn personal pain into commercial success.

[A] Crow: I have been inspired by many things. A lot of women have inspired me. A prostitute inspired me to write one of my favorite songs, Sweet Rosalyn. One of my mother's friends inspired me to write Oh, Marie. I went through a phase when John Fante was my muse. He was a pulp novelist in Los Angeles in the Thirties who was known for wino writing, because he wrote about the dark underbelly of fame and celebrity. The characters in his novel Ask the Dust are beautiful derelicts, and I used his hero, Arturo Bandini, in the song Superstar—"I beat around the streets like Bandini looking for Camilla. I'll be satin and speed. If you and I are still alive, we'll get off these streets." After my first album became such a huge hit—against all odds and logic—I became a pariah among my old band, who resented me because I was the one being noticed. I was so pissed off at them I wrote If It Makes You Happy, which basically told everyone I knew to fuck off. At the same time, it taught me a lot about the nature of this business. I am completely uncomfortable with the idea of superstardom. I was labeled an angry woman, which I never have been. I have a healthy cynicism, but not anger. So I wrote the song Am I Getting Through, which has the line "I am sweet, I am ugly, I am mean if you love me."

[Q] Playboy: You have quite a range of subject matter in your song catalog.

[A] Crow: I have written about people buying guns at Wal-Mart—which cost me the sale of half a million units when Wal-Mart refused to carry my album because of the song—the feeding frenzies of the media, the decadence of daytime television and the O.J. trial, which, by the way, forced me to throw away my television because I was so outraged.

[Q] Playboy: You toured again with Lilith Fair this past summer. Being a man, I must ask: Why is Lilith Fair necessary?

[A] Crow: A lot of guys obviously have a problem with Lilith Fair—even Jerry Falwell has gotten into it. He says the mythological character Lilith was a demon woman. You know we must be doing something right to draw that guy's ire. Right from the start there have been jokes about Lilith Fair, and everybody in the industry thought it would be a bust. That might explain why it's become such a smashing success. I mean, it blew the Rockapaloozas, or Lollapa-loozas, or whatever they were, right off the map. A lot of what's on the radio now is onstage at Lilith Fair. I feel very matriarchal about it, because I'm an old fart now. I don't know who a lot of the artists on the charts are—I don't know who 702 is, I don't know 98 Degrees or the Sporty Thievz. At Lilith Fair this year, you saw Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders! Is there a sane person who wouldn't rather see them than Limp Bizkit?

[Q] Playboy: You've written some intriguing lyrics about the nature of celebrity, such as: "Wanna be Madonna but the price is too high/Perfect Rhythm Nazis in the pagan rhythm nation/Everybody's equal in the glow of radiation."

[A] Crow: That's my Dylan imitation. We all try to write in that stream of consciousness, but only Bob Dylan got it right. That fixation with celebrities is a big thing with me. You have all these television shows with audiences that get vicarious thrills watching people beat up each other. It's just a queer sort of time warp, searching for something that has meaning amid all this shit. When we did the first album, we were cynical about the whole Reagan–Bush mindset, which led to so much social unrest—the Rodney King riots and so on. The "pagan rhythm nation" thing is an homage to that whole Janet Jackson sound, the military-style dancing, robots without souls. That's what we thought about everybody. And things haven't gotten much better since then. I worry now about what will happen if George W. Bush gets elected president, because I think that we're on the verge of some serious change, and it won't be real good. The first thing the Republicans will do is try to get abortion outlawed and end all gun laws. I keep hoping that Colin Powell will get elected. It will take a nonpolitician to save us from the politicians who will eventually destroy us.

[Q] Playboy: There is another Dylanesque riff in A Change (Would Do You Good)—"He's a platinum canary, drinkin' Falstaff beer/Mercedes rule and a rented Lear/Bottom feeder insincere/Prophet lo-fi pioneer." Was that a former paramour of yours?

[A] Crow: [Laughs] Again, people would be surprised where these characters come from. I had read a couple of articles about the reissue of the Joe Meek collection. Joe Meek was a really lo-fi music producer in the early Sixties. He was producing music in his apartment, recording drums in his kitchen and vocals in his bathroom. He eventually went crazy. He shot his landlady, then went and shot himself. He was really a loon, and that's what the song is about.

[Q] Playboy: Still, by the time of The Globe Sessions, the bulk of your subject matter was clearly romantic treachery.

[A] Crow: That album was the result of taking some time off and kind of processing the last five or six years of relationships. I sat down to make it with all kinds of great intentions, and every time I would write a line about a relationship in the first person, I'd put the song away and say, I'm not going to put that on the record. By the end of the process, I had 18 songs that I had put in the B pile and none in the A pile. So I decided that that was the album. I remember getting on an airplane months later and seeing in USA Today the release date. I just started bawling. I called my manager and said, "We can't put it out, it's a piece of crap! It's not finished and I don't even know what it is." And then Bob Dylan called and said, "I have a song for you," which turned out to be Mississippi, a beautiful piece of work that blew me away. That really turned it around for me, to be able to tack that on the album.

[Q] Playboy: The rumor, of course, is that the "love sucks" songs on the album are about your past relationship with Eric Clapton.

[A] Crow: I don't really feel it's my responsibility to go into every detail of my romances, because at the end of the day the lyrics are all universal anyway. Everybody, whether they're heterosexual or gay, has relationships, and they wind up either for the best or in hell. I understand it's human nature to try to figure it all out. Any time I'm seen with another celebrity, it's food for fodder. I went on Letterman the day Matt Lauer was on, but I didn't even meet him. The next day I was engaged to him in the newspapers. And I can't tell you how many people I know have said, "It's me, right?" about my songs. I think they want to believe it's them. In reality, very few references are about anyone specifically. My Favorite Mistake is about several people in my life who weren't very good ideas—but not Eric. I've known Eric for over ten years, and I can't look at that relationship as a mistake.

[Q] Playboy: Did you feel guilty when Kevin Gilbert, your ex-boyfriend and a musician in your original band, was found with a leather noose around his neck in May 1996, dead of autoerotic asphyxiation?

[A] Crow: Not at all. I loved Kevin, but he was a really unhappy person. He was unhappy when I was with him, and nothing I did made him any happier. I've never seen anyone more at odds with the universe than he was—not even me. Kevin's death was a colossal waste of a young and talented mind, but he just wasn't able to help himself. I knew exactly what he was going through, because I've gone through that myself. I was a good Missouri girl, raised in the Bible Belt, and all I wanted to do for a long while was just end it all. If I couldn't get a record deal, if the industry disillusioned me, if I felt unhappy, well, then I just wanted to kill myself. It's not really that you want to kill yourself, though, and I don't think Kevin wanted to kill himself when he died. You just want to get rid of what's making you so sad. It took five years of therapy for me to stop repeating the same stupid mistakes and find a strong identity. Kevin never got to that point.

[Q] Playboy: What's the best thing about your current relationship, with the actor Owen Wilson?

[A] Crow: That it's still going great after a year. I made a movie with him called The Minus Man, which was directed by Hampton Fancher. Janeane Garofalo is in it, and Mercedes Ruehl and Brian Cox. I play a junkie, which is perfect because I always wanted to be a junkie. I just didn't want to do the drugs.

[Q] Playboy: Are you a true feminist?

[A] Crow: Up to a point, sure. But I'm an old-fashioned girl. I want to settle down, have my babies. I love Bonnie Raitt, but when she gets up at Lilith Fair and says, "Let's synchronize periods," I cringe. I mean, do we really need to hear that?

[Q] Playboy: You're a friend of Hillary Clinton's. Do you pity her?

[A] Crow: I admire her and I pity her. I've met her and her husband. I thought they were both hung out to dry by some good old backwoods Arkansas swindlers. I know the type; I grew up only three miles from the Arkansas border. But I've been disappointed in him, like everyone else has been, for being so goddamn reckless. I think Hillary could write some kick-ass songs, but they wouldn't be rock songs. They'd be opera songs. She'd be Aïda, and she'd probably die with Bill in the crypt.

[Q] Playboy: What do you put on the stereo when you're about to have sex?

[A] Crow: Barry White. He's better than any aphrodisiac. Barry's been there for the conception of more children than anyone else in history.

[Q] Playboy: Is doing a great concert or seeing one of your songs go to number one as good as great sex?

[A] Crow: A great concert is. Sex and great live music are both very transportive. They take you out of your body, or deep inside it. Both can make you have an orgasm. Performing with the Rolling Stones was a complete sexual experience for me. Singing Honky Tonk Woman with Mick Jagger is my definition of sex. But having a hit? Hell no! That's not sex. That's pure, cold fear. Sex takes you higher. A hit means there's nowhere to go from there but down.