Sheryl’s soulful return after brain tumour
AFTER pulling out all the stops on her 2019 release Threads, Sheryl Crow was adamant she’d never make another album. Built around marquee duets with Stevie Nicks, Mavis Staples, Keith Richards and others, Threads had been a mammoth undertaking. If it was to be the last time, she was going out with a bang.
At least that was the plan… but, while focusing on one-off singles might have boosted her streaming figures, Crow is better suited to the longer, deeper format. And when she sent a couple of songs she’d written at home in Nashville to her producer Mike Elizondo, more quickly followed and it became obvious a full-length album, Evolution, was in the offing. Crow, 62, was also motivated by a belief that music should come ‘from the soul’ rather than being created through artificial intelligence, a point she makes abundantly clear on the title track, which describes her feelings on hearing an AI-generated hit on the airwaves.
‘Turned on the radio and there it was, a song that sounded like something I wrote,’ she sings. ‘The voice and melody were hauntingly so familiar that I thought it was a joke.’
There’s nothing remotely machine-tooled about Evolution, which moves between tender country-soul and upbeat pop on songs inspired by a desire to connect on a simple human level.
Crow’s life hasn’t been straightforward, with high-profile broken romances and battles against breast cancer in 2006 and a benign brain tumour in 2011, but most of the new songs are of a sunny, if slightly bruised, disposition.
‘I’m not gonna let a moment slip away,’ she sings on Love Life, a languid strut on which she’s backed by former Prince accomplice Wendy Melvoin’s funky guitar. She’s similarly philosophical on You Can’t Change The Weather, playing a Beatles-like melody on a Wurlitzer electric piano as she suggests that ‘every moment has a brand new start’.
The Wurlitzer surfaces again on Broken Record, a catchy, 1960s-style bubblegum pop tune, while Do It Again is a distant relation of her 1994 hit All I Wanna Do.
String arranger Rob Moose comes to the fore as Evolution moves through the gears.
Alarm Clock — in which Sheryl dreams of being served cocktails by Hollywood sex symbol Timothée Chalamet before her sleep is disturbed by her early morning buzzer — features gnarly guitars.
Having set a high bar with Threads, Crow’s reluctance to make another LP was understandable. But with a new wave of female artists — Boygenius, Lorde and Haim — citing her as a role model, she’s timed her unexpected comeback rather well.
O WHEN Texas made their TV debut in 1989, singer Sharleen Spiteri was a guitar-slinging rocker whose idols were Chrissie Hynde and The Clash. But Stateside soul music has proved a more enduring source of inspiration, and the Glasgow band’s new album reiterates the point.
The Muscle Shoals Sessions was made in the Alabama city of that name with veteran keyboardist Dewey Lindon Oldham Jr. (nicknamed Spooner after he was blinded in one eye by a spoon falling from a shelf), and it doubles down on those soul influences by taking 11 familiar Texas songs and three covers and refashioning them in a stripped-down manner.
Oldham, 80, a guiding light of Southern soul, played on Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman and Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You), and his delicate piano work brings out the best in Spiteri, who delivers some of her most audacious performances.
There’s an onus on tracks from the ’90s, when Texas experimented with R&B on albums White On Blonde and The Hush — Halo is bolstered by simple strings; Sharleen dovetails beautifully with the backing singers on Summer Son.
The covers suit the mood. Would I Lie To You was a 1992 hit for retro-soul duo Charles & Eddie; The Drifters’ Save The Last Dance is joyous. With no new material, this could be viewed as a sidestep. If that’s so, it’s a glorious one.