Imagine for a moment that Sheryl Crow isn't a babe, that she isn't the foxy answer to any number of boys' sweaty questions, that we have no idea that she looks like a cast-member of "Friends." Having imagined all of that, the question remains: Is it possible to take Sheryl Crow seriously? Does she have any real rock credibility?
Given that she neatly swiped all the credit for the Tuesday Night Music Club -- with only a passing nod to the other players by naming her debut album after them -- given that her big hit off that album was a paen to drinking beer in the morning (all she wanna do is have some alcoholic fun), given that her voice sounds like she works awful hard to summon up real emotion, and fails time after time, the answer is clear.
It doesn't matter how many zillions of albums sold the first time out, it doesn't matter how ubiquitous her songs are on MOR radio stations, it doesn't matter that Dave Letterman is warm for her form. Nope, Sheryl Crow does not now, and isn't likely to ever have even a modicum of rock cred. She's too slick, too contrived, too derivative, just too too.
Now, with "Sheryl Crow," which will hit the stores on Tuesday, the singer is attempting to prove she can too do it all by herself, having been abandoned by producer Bill Bottrell (brain child of the Tuesday Night Music Club) after one day of collaboration. This time out, she wrote the songs, produced the recording sessions, played actual instruments, in an apparently frantic attempt to prove herself as "real."
The result is about as real as Hootie and the Blowfish, about as ground-breaking as Edie Brickell and precisely as irritating as a jackhammer outside your window at dawn. It's hard to understand why Crow is so eager to grab credit for lyrics like, "If it makes you happy/ then why the hell are you so sad?" and "Of every person who died in hate/throw us a bone, you men of great." (The latter may well be one of the most awkward rhymes ever written.) And when she sings, "Mary, Mary quite contrary, close the door now, it's much too scary," it's difficult not to hoot with laughter.
This album is as disposable as day-old used Kleenex and as grating as election year hyperbole. Sure, it'll sell. Yes, radio stations will put her into heavy rotation until the vapid lyrics burrow into our collective unconscious like grubs breeding underneath a moldering log. But it doesn't mean that Sheryl Crow has a single thing in common with rock and roll.
By Julene Snyder