Sheryl Crow: 2017

Sheryl Crow has lived outside of Nashville for a while, but her ninth album, called Be Myself, edges away from the country music direction she forged on 2013’s Feels like Home.  Be Myself returns Crow to her mid-Nineties roots, while updating that sound too.

 

The trick for Sheryl in conceiving Be Myself, was to reconnect with the music that makes her happy, without artifice or plan, and to write freely. On this new album, Crow returned to the kind of music that her fans first discovered 24 years ago on Tuesday Night Music Club—raucous, luminous, and subversively sharp.

 

Crow laid the foundations of Be Myself with two longtime collaborators who know her best: songwriter and guitarist Jeff Trott and engineer Tchad Blake, who mixed this album.

 

On this edition of FUV Live, Crow and Trott came to the Bronx for a rare acoustic duet on three songs from Be Myself. The two friends discussed the relaxed vibe that was essential to this album’s birth, their long-lived artistic partnership, and the effect of world events, from last fall’s Presidential election to the passing of Prince, on their songwriting.

 

[recorded: 3/6/17]