Music

‘This incredible detour we’ve been taken on in the past seven years has brought us to this place of sleep, where we can’t seem to even address what’s happening around us. Otherwise we’d have impeached our president and would be trying our administration for war crimes. Instead we’re just asleep at the wheel. I think it’s the result of this very effective fear campaign.’

Who do you think made this statement – Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton or Sheryl Crow? Well, as the picture above has probably hinted, it’s renowned political scientist Sheryl Crow. Resuming her traitorous slander against our beloved G-Dub, Sheryl continues, ‘There’s a lot of irony to this idea of democratising other countries when our country is going through the most fascist period it has ever experienced. Our leadership go to other countries in the name of democracy and basically become a tyrannical presence… it’s almost too much for us to fathom to even know how to begin to change it. But I think that people are beginning to wake up.’

Crow is talking about her new album, ‘Detours’, which reunites her with ‘Tuesday Night Music Club’ producer Bill Bottrell. It’s a world away from her carefree origins. Inspired by rolling news and an uncertain future for her three-month-old daughter, ‘Detours’ deals with Crow’s concerns about everyday problems like war, corruption, nuclear armageddon and, in particular, global warming. Weirdly, that makes it the most populist thing she’s ever done. There are some people who think that politics should be kept out of music. And those people should probably stop reading, right now. Crow has spent the last couple of years sharpening her political claws, including taking part in a college tour with ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ producer Laurie David.

‘We’re at a moment in time where we’re going to see things really shift,’ Crow says. ‘But not before it becomes markedly worse, I’m afraid. The whole thing is Orwellian. This administration has been so deeply hand in hand with special interests to the point that we must deny the science of global warming in order to maintain our relationships with the oil companies, it’s sinister. The situation seems dire. But hopefully people will find a modicum of hope on the record that all is not lost.’

It’s likely that the vast majority of these sentiments will sail over the heads of those who need to hear them most – after all, Bruce Springsteen is still the hero of the workin’ man despite pissing on the flag on an album cover (‘Born In The USA’) and endorsing sodomy (‘Streets Of Philadelphia’). Still, it’s a bold move given that the Dixie Chicks’ last album got a reception you’d normally expect for a new release from Frankenstein’s lab merely for saying they didn’t like George Bush, once, on stage, in Britain. Is Crow worried about receiving the same treatment?

‘No, I think that if anything happens to me, if I get banned or worse, then there also is the story. I say, let’s turn the floodlight on all of that.’
It’s easy to be cynical about this sort of statement – there’s been no such thing as bad publicity since the New Testament started selling. But that’s the point – in a country of 300 million consumers, roughly half are opposed to the status quo. Rebellion is surely a marketable quality.

Even during the (last) Clinton presidency, the most prosperous, liberated era America has seen, the people's hero was a junky moaning about his tummyache. Now there are some real issues to deal with, low-self-esteem outfits like Fall Out Boy are still being foisted on the youth. ‘What’s happened in the music business is largely karmic,’ Crow says. ‘When the music business became so heavily invested in being commercial, a lot of artists got away from writing about anything troubadour-like. People were very comfortable, and obviously that’s largely why we are where we are. Had our friends been drafted to go to the war, people would have been in the streets.’

Although her language is sometimes forced, Crow differs from the Stings, Bonos and even Geldofs of this world by not coming across as punchably sanctimonious. Her sentiments seem genuine and grass-roots rather than being aimed at scoring a sweet UN goodwill ambassador gig. ‘Love Is Free’, Crow’s deceptively chirpy song about the aftermath (and premath) of Hurricane Katrina, is one of the brightest tunes of her career, but the YouTube video for the song sees Crow tour the wreckage of New Orleans.

‘With Katrina,’ she says, ‘the fact that we knew that was coming, we weren’t prepared, we allowed our administration to disregard those people and we still haven’t done anything about it, is more representative of us and where we’re at than even perhaps the administration.’

Most importantly, with this being the Music section rather than the Lecture section, her words are set to just the kind of sunny, optimistic country-lite which has made her the seventeenth richest woman in rock (according to Forbes, which gets wet for that kind of stuff).

‘Juxtaposed with the idea that we’ve gone to sleep at the wheel, there’s this giddiness, like: Okay, I’m awake, and how do I channel this energy into making something happen ? It’s the only place to be at this moment, otherwise you just fold up and die. Ha ha!’

Sheryl Crow plays the Scala on February 14. ’Detours’ is released on February 18 on Polydor.