FINALLY HAVING FUN
Sheryl on love and Lance
Here comes Mum, home from the school run. It’s a beautiful spring morning and this single parent to two adopted sons has her family routine down pat. She hasn’t travelled for work in two years “just so the boys can stay home and be normal. I take ’em to school every day and pick
’em up. I’m at everything and I go to the Boy Scout meetings.”
Here in the wealthy suburbs of Nashville, this is a typically domestic scene. But this mum is Sheryl Crow, a singer-songwriter who’s sold 50 million albums, won nine Grammy Awards and whose office is a huge barn on her 20ha horse ranch.
Her commuter vehicle of choice? Not the Corvette Stingray that’s parked outside the garage of her sprawling country mansion – she keeps that 1964 classic for special occasions. Today Sheryl is behind the wheel of her offroad buggy and waves cheerfully as she hops down, before striding into the barn.
It’s a blissful lifestyle the 55-year-old singer has carved out since recovering from breast cancer 10 years ago. (Later, in 2012, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour, although this turned out to be benign.)
“It took the whole cancer thing for me to look at my life and go, ‘What did I think my life was going to look like?’ I thought I was going to get married and have kids because that’s what my parents did. But I never thought I was going to have cancer. And I also didn’t think I was going to become a well-known rock star and travel the world,” she laughs.
“So after I had cancer, I thought I can be a mum – and if a great man comes in and becomes a part of that story, fantastic. But I’m probably not gonna get married and have children in that order. So let’s start the process and see what happens.”
Sheryl was single when she adopted her first son,
Wyatt (9), in 2007, a year after splitting up with cyclist Lance Armstrong (more of which later), and was so involved in the process that she was present at his birth and personally cut his umbilical cord. Levi, now six, born to different birth parents, followed in 2010.
Would she adopt a third child? No is the short answer.
“I got called right before Christmas about a baby,” she beams with a broad smile.
“For a second, I thought, ‘Oh!’ But no, it’s great the way it is now. My boys are out of diapers, they’re fantastic little people and it’s perfect. Three would be a lot!”
We are in her loft, clutching steaming mugs of her favourite tea (PG Tips) as we sink into comfortably worn armchairs. The room is stuffed with guitars and recording equipment – she has recently completed the rollicking Be Myself, her ninth studio album. It’s the latest instalment in a nonstop career that exploded into life with the success of the 1994 single All I Wanna Do. Today, as Sheryl prepares to go on tour, she enjoys the well-established credentials of a rootsy rocker who knows her way around a killer melody and is renowned for kicking up a storm onstage.
The singer has always put her life and soul into her music and lyrics. On Be Myself, she tackles everything from love and happiness to politics, Donald Trump and sexual exploitation. Famously, her 1998 single My Favorite Mistake featured the lyric “you were the only one that I ever loved”, which was widely assumed to be about her relationship with rock guitarist Eric Clapton.
When asked whether the English guitar hero was indeed “the one”, she brushes the question off. “I’m never going to answer that,” she says. “But I love Eric. I will always love Eric. He probably wouldn’t know this, but even before I knew him, he was just an important figure in my life, in a weird way.
“I actually had a couple of dreams about him that were powerful enough that I can remember them and still feel what they felt like,” she reveals. “He was almost... I don’t want to say angelic in the conventional angel way, but angelic in the anointed way.”
Other former boyfriends include actor Owen Wilson and Lance. Sheryl dated
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the now-disgraced cyclist for three years and the couple were engaged before splitting in 2006, a week before she was diagnosed with breast cancer – and long before news of his drug cheating exploded into the public domain.
Sheryl has consistently refused to go into detail about what she might or might not have known. When asked if doping was part of the reason for the relationship ending, she responds, “There were other things that were much more problematic about the whole situation. There were a lot of things that fed into us not being together, like there are in every relationship.
We just had some very big, fundamental differences.”
That relationship, she wearily reminds me, ended 11 years ago, though it seems she can never escape it. The week of this interview, Lance had been back in the news – the US government is suing him for fraud to the tune of $140m. Is it frustrating that she isn’t allowed to move on? “He was a piece of my life that was so important in that moment and now it doesn’t feel like anything,” she says. “He holds no relevance to my life whatsoever.” She is, she insists, happily single.
When it’s suggested she has sacrificed love and an enduring relationship for music, she responds, “I wouldn’t say I’ve sacrificed it. I would just say I was just unsuccessful. It took me a long time to learn what it means to be authentic and intimate with someone – and I don’t mean sexually. But to let your guard down, and speak your truth and let the chips fall where they may.
You have to have that in a relationship. I’m still learning.
“I would love to be in a relationship now. I’d love for my kids to witness what a successful, loving relationship looks like. But I’m not dead, so I don’t think it’s impossible! I’m just a work in progress.”
More rewarding, perhaps, has been Sheryl’s working relationships with high-profile artists – she’s performed with everyone from Michael Jackson (as a backing singer on the
Bad world tour) to the Rolling Stones. In her next album, Threads, she duets with a number of famous singers, including Stevie Nicks, Keith Richards, Stevie Wonder and even the late Johnny Cash.
Sheryl grew up in Missouri in a middle-class home and lives in the largely conservative home of country music, but she’s avowedly liberal, and the lyrics on her new album address some concerns. “There’s a lot about the intrusion of technology and how it messes with a relationship,” she says. The very first line on Alone in the Dark, is, “I told you to be discreet, but you went to the world and you broadcast me.” It is, she admits, “about the idea that you can sell somebody out over the internet”.
She also addresses “the fear-mongering of President Trump’s America”. In A
Heartbeat Away, she writes:
“You bet the President is sweating, while Russia is blowing up the phone.”
“Trump’s presence on the record is really felt. It’s about the uncertainty and fear he was creating, but also what it says about us as people, that we would even entertain the idea of having someone like him in power,” she says.
Sheryl is equally alarmed by the wider sexual climate and lays out her concerns on the album’s closing track Woo
Woo, where she sings, “The girl’s got a secret underneath those jeans. Camera goes up
when she shakes that thing...” She adds, “The idea is that all of our pop figures are out there advertising their round a****. And that’s what we’re projecting not only to our young girls but also to our young boys about what beauty is. It’s a very weird time. And then to turn around and say you’re a role model!
“I also look at what women are doing to their faces and bodies in order to stay that young looking, and it can actually look tragic and atrocious. I wish women could sustain the careers that men do. But I went out and saw Chrissie Hynde play recently and I was blown away. She was as hot as ever and rocking. She gives me hope.”
Could Sheryl imagine starting out in music in this overly sexualised climate? “There’s no way I could do it. I remember on my first album, this stylist came in with all these gorgeous clothes. I was, like, ‘Urgh!’ I thought to myself, ‘I have to make sure I don’t look glamorous because I want to be taken seriously.’
“So on my first couple of albums, you couldn’t even see what I looked like – everything was blurry and I wore trashy clothes.” She recalls how her fears were realised around the video for her Grammywinning 1996 single If it
Makes You Happy.
“The way they shot it, you could see up my skirt. And when I got the cut, I said to the record label, ‘We’re going to have to re-edit this thing because you can see my underwear.’ And they said, ‘Is that really a bad thing?’ We went through it and cut it frame by frame,” she says firmly. “But it’s so different now.
There are these magazines that come in [to the house]. It’s like a workout magazine, but there’s always a girl on the cover of it in a bathing suit.”
The profusion of that kind of imagery, she notes, only leads to exploitation all round. “Some of these very high-profile artists are misconstruing that as having power,” she says, sucking her teeth. “They’re off the mark.”
Today, Sheryl’s primary concern is her family and her health. When we spoke in 2013, she told us she had MRI scans every six months, to keep tabs on the brain tumour.
“Now I do them every two years,” she says. “I just had one, it’s all good, hadn’t grown. Well, a minuscule amount but nothing more.” She’s not worried about it.
“I use it now and again as an excuse for my bad memory,” Sheryl grins.
As it is, the family-of-three is looking forward to travelling together as she embarks on a tour in support of Be Myself. For Wyatt and Levi, Mum’s job, more than anything, is a nuisance. “They’re like,
‘Mum, why do you have to work today?’ And when I tell them, ‘Well, who’s gonna pay for the Lego?’ they understand it – and they’re excited about going on the road,” she reveals.
So what are her expectations of the tour this year? “I don’t for one second kid myself that this record is going to shoot up the charts,” she says. “It’s just good if it gets heard. And now being one of the elder stateswomen of music...”
The musician allows herself a wry smile. “I look around and go, ‘Oh, gosh, there’s just so much manoeuvring to be the next sexiest, the most trending, I just think, ‘Wait till you get to the point where you’re just happy to be who you are.’
“It is,” Sheryl yells with delight, “liberating!”
‘I don’t for one second kid myself that this record is going to shoot up the charts’