Five-time Grammy award winner Sheryl Crow spoke candidly in an interview with The Dartmouth about growing up in Missouri, going to college, and becoming the renowned musician she is today. Through it all, music, she said, was always an important part of her life.
Crow, in jeans and a sweater complemented by a delicate Southern drawl, recounted her childhood days in a liberal but strict household which taught her to be very "earthbound" and "exposed to lots of different kinds of music."
"That, I think, actually gave me the basis for what I am doing now," she said of her upbringing. "My parents never raised me to believe that there was anything I couldn't do."
She attended local schools in Kennett, Mo. about an hour and a half from Memphis, Tenn. before heading off to the University of Missouri at Columbia where she studied music and graduated with a degree in classical piano.
"I was a kid who music came so easily for that I didn't have to really invest the kind of grit I should have," Crow recalled.
She said she regrets not having focused more energy on her studies while at the University, though she liked her college years.
"I spent a lot of my time playing in rock bands, and kind of concentrating on that area of my development as opposed to taking my music classes so seriously," she laughed.
If she were to do it all over again, she said she would probably major in literature. She said she has spent the "last 10 years ... playing catch-up" reading the classics she missed while in school.
"I probably would approach [college] quite a bit differently now," she said, "But you're really young when you go to school so you don't really have that kind of wisdom about it yet."
The 'Bad' years
After college, Crow got engaged at the age of 21 and moved with her fiance to St. Louis. She got a job teaching music at an elementary school which she remembers as "the something to fall back on degree" because songwriting was her true passion.
While teaching she did some local recording, including the vocals for several commercials, and enjoyed it.
Of the commercials that were widely run, Crow said, "I made probably three times the amount I made in teaching in 45 minutes of work which is really disillusioning."
While reminiscing on her St. Louis days Crow burst into song -- but not into a song of her own.
"It's a good time for the great taste of McDonalds," she chimed from the 1980s fast food jingle that was part of one of her more memorable commercial gigs.
Her engagement fell apart, and after about three years as a teacher, Crow left St. Louis and headed to Los Angeles to pursue her musical dreams. It was a huge step, she said, for a young woman who had never really traveled far from her home in Missouri.
But life for the small town girl would only get more exciting from there. In L.A., she got wind of a closed audition for a background vocalist for Michael Jackson's "Bad" tour; singers had to be recommended in order to even be allowed to try out.
Crow was not one of those recommended auditioners but, in keeping with the values she grew up with, didn't let it stop her from trying anyway. It was probably one of the most consequential decisions of her career.
"I wound up crashing [the audition]," Crow said. She was then called back for a second audition after which, she said, Jackson "chose me out of I-don't-know-how-many people."
Within a few months, Crow was singing backup for Jackson in front of crowds as large as 80,000 people in Japan and other places around the world in 1987 and 1988.
"By all accounts, it was a kind of crash course in music industry because Michael, at that time, was probably the biggest recording artist out there," she recalled. "And the phenomenon that sort of perambulated around him at that time was incredible."
After the 18-month tour ended, Crow came home to what she described as a very confusing time in her life.
"I went from being in the most bright limelight to going back to being a struggling songwriter again," she said.
Though the tour was an interesting and fairly enjoyable experience, she said she had had no plans to make a career of backup singing.
She waited tables to support herself and continued to compose songs. She began to record tapes of her original music. She tried time and again to get a recording contract, but to no avail.
Flat broke and questioning her future, Crow signed a publishing deal to allow her songs to be recorded by other artists. Stars such as Eric Clapton and Tina Turner recorded Crow's songs.
Thinking back to those difficult years, she said, "If you are led to chase a career you love, then tenacity is possibly the most important ingredient." But Crow still could not get a recording contract of her own.
"In the early '90s and late '80s, what was going on for women in music was, for the most part, pop music steeped in sexuality and appearance and contrived and calculated -- most of it actually being dance music," she said. "There was nothing terribly lyric-driven with the exception of maybe Tracy Chapman and Suzanne Vega."
Breaking ground
Crow persevered through rejections from every record label she sent tapes to. Looking back, she said doesn't believe she was rejected for lack of talent or on merit, but "mainly, because [the labels] had no idea what to do with me."
"It was a difficult time for women to be taken seriously," she said.
But things changed when Crow met producer and recording engineer Hugh Padgham, who had worked with Vega, Phil Collins, and other big names, at a party. Padgham asked her if he could listen to one of her tapes.
Padgham liked Crow's music and asked for her permission to take the tape to friends at A&M Records. Amazingly, unlike the countless other record labels that had turned her down, A&M took a chance on the almost-thirty-year-old female rocker from Missouri.
Crow was signed quietly in 1991, without the "feeding frenzy" that surrounds many new artists. Less than a year later, she had recorded a self-titled debut album, but she was unhappy with it and persuaded A & M to discard it because she felt the production of it was too "slick."
Finally, almost three years after signing her recording contract, Crow released her first official album, "Tuesday Night Music Club." Within months, Sheryl Crow was a bonified star.
The album went multi-platinum and became the third best-selling album of 1994. Songs such as "Leaving Las Vegas," "Strong Enough" and "All I Wanna Do" brought a new, raw female sound to the public's ears, which soon couldn't get enough of Sheryl Crow.
"All I Wanna Do" won Crow her first Grammy for Record of the Year. Besides simply sounding good, Crow's music also commented on issues important to the singer.
"No One Said It Would Be Easy" discussed the endings of personal relationships, and "What Can I Do For You" confronts sexual harassment.
Since then, Crow has released three more albums including the critically acclaimed "The Globe Sessions" and a live recording from New York's Central Park while also appearing on movie soundtracks and helping to produce albums for other artists.
Along the way, she garnered four more Grammy awards among a myriad of other commendations. This year, Crow was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for her remake of "Sweet Child O' Mine" for the "Big Daddy" motion picture soundtrack.
Landmines and Wal-Mart
But Crow does more than make music. For years, she has used her celebrity to promote numerous charitable causes, most notably the worldwide campaign for the removal of landmines leftover from war times.
Recently, she traveled to Vietnam and Cambodia in support of the campaign to end landmine use which she said was an "eye-opening experience."
Her involvement with the cause began with a trip to Bosnia with First Lady Hillary Clinton in 1994, before which, Crow said, she "didn't even know what a landmine was."
She said although President Bill Clinton has not signed the Ottowa Treaty, her work and the work of other artists such as Emmylou Harris and Bruce Springsteen has generated dialogue about the subject.
But Crow's work is not without controversy. In 1996, the national chain store Wal-Mart refused to stock her self-titled second album because of the lyrics of one of the songs the corporation deemed offensive.
The track "Love is a Good Thing" contains the lines: "Watch out sister, watch out brother / Watch our children as they kill each other / With a gun they bought at the Wal-Mart discount stores."
At the time, the chain was implicated in the sales of guns to minors which resulted in violent crimes. Crow said she was shocked and angered when she walked into a Wal-Mart years ago and saw weapons, including semi-automatic rifles and 'dum-dum' bullets, being sold next to the children's toys department.
"It just seemed like a strange position to take to not step up to the plate and take responsibility but, instead, to ban my records," Crow said. "And they really had an opportunity to rise to the occasion and make a great, altruistic statement but chose not to."
She also said she disapproves of the way Wal-Mart stores have moved into smaller communities, putting local, "mom-and-pop" stores out of business while not taking invested roles in the communities.
Now, however, Wal-Mart only sells guns and ammunition through catalogues, though Crow said she is not sure that is because of her. She noted that Wal-Mart has also required some artists to change album covers it found objectionable.
On criticism, whether personal or artistic, Crow said she refuses to read reviews of her work for fear of reading something "insulting," she said with a laugh.
Crow continues to focus on her artistic endeavors. Her most recent release, "Sheryl Crow and Friends -- Live from Central Park" is a recording of a live concert she did with such musical greats as Eric Clapton.
Crow also entered the acting world, playing a heroin addict in last fall's independent release, "The Minus Man," but said she doesn't foresee much more acting in her future because music is her true love.
"I always wanted to be a heroin addict but never wanted to do the drug," Crow joked on her acting debut.
Currently, she is helping to produce an album by Stevie Nicks. Crow said she has recorded some vocals for the album but is not sure what will make it into the final release.
Crow ended her interview with The Dartmouth with some advice for the college student with artistic interests who may be feeling pressured into studying more "money-making" fields:
"Creativity is the passion for wanting to live beyond your own mind, to surpass your own mortality. Whatever it is that calls you to be creative, I don't think is heavily influenced by what you are studying," she said.
