Sheryl - rock star Sheryl Crow - Interview

Overnight success? It took a decade for Sheryl Crow, who tells her friend Elisabeth Shue that she had to be her own Joan of Arc when the music business didn't want to know

ELISABETH SHUE: Interviewing my friend Sheryl Crow is about the weirdest thing I've ever had to do. Anyway, I thought I'd start by asking you about your upbringing . . .

SHERYL CROW: I'd love to say I had romantic beginnings or a hugely sordid past, but I had a close-knit family and a really normal upbringing. I have two older sisters and a younger brother, and we're all really tight. Although we lived in a small town [Kennett, Mo.] without many cosmopolitan influences, my parents were pretty artsy people. They were [big band] musicians, so I grew up with lots of people coming in and out of our house, playing music live, and that's what I thought every kid was raised with. My father was really into books and was constantly reading aloud from Pudd'nhead Wilson or whatever. We were raised in a freewheeling artistic climate and we weren't limited as far as choosing the things we wanted to do.

ES: How old were you when you first got the itch to perform?

SC: My room was a piano teacher and she started each of us kids in piano when we were about five or six. I really hated it, but I discovered I could play by ear. I can remember being about eight years old and learning "My Love" by Paul McCartney and Wings and the line "My love does it good," and my dad coming into the living room going, "Do you know what that means?" My first bit of censorship.

ES: So it wasn't like you were into performing - you were just singing naturally?

SC: No. My parents were the kind that showed you off and made you play in front of their friends. I hated performing from a very early age and I never loved it. How I wound up doing it for a living, I have no idea.

ES: I feel the same about acting. At school, I was terrified of performing or being asked about my opinions.

SC: Boy, I'll tell you, I couldn't even get through debating class. I hated that, too, and I still don't like public speaking. I can sing in front of a hundred thousand people, but public speaking for me is completely terrifying.

ES: It's interesting how we both took on a way of life that forces us to face what we are totally afraid of.

SC: I have been asked about it so much and, as you know, I have been through quite a bit of therapy -

ES: Me, too.

SC: - and I'm convinced there is some wacky preexisting condition with performers, that they're crying out for the attention or approval they didn't get when they were kids and that forces them to stand up in front of people and act out. The one great revelation I got was from sitting in the dark in the living room and playing my own little songs at the piano. As I've gotten older, I don't know if pursuing music is just a rebellious action to try to validate myself, or what. I guess if you look that far back with a predeterministic view, I was eventually going to wind up as a musician. I have this theory there is some order to all the chaos and that if you stay clear and focused and try to be a good person, you probably will wind up doing what you're supposed to be doing anyway.

ES: It's like why are you here? You're here to learn certain lessons, so you choose a path that's going to force you to learn those lessons.

SC: Yeah, I can imagine what I was last time I was here on earth - a librarian, probably.

ES: I think I was a stripper.

SC: That would've been great: Think what you'd've learned. I think I might have also been a housewife.

ES: For me, acting became a way to finally express myself as an Individual in a family in which I grew up with three brothers. Did you experience that?

SC: Absolutely. My whole young life I was trying to please my parents and I missed out on so much because I knew if I experimented I would disappoint them. So when I got to my twenties I was really mad - not at them, but because my whole life I'd tried to be a perfect kid, and when I got out into the world I didn't even know who I was anymore. I wound up gravitating toward music and started trying to write my own songs. That's where I landed after having taught school for two years.

ES: You taught school?

SC: Yeah. After I graduated [from the University of Missouri], I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was twenty years old and I got engaged to this boy, Mike, one of the guys in the band I was in at the time - I'd been in bands my whole life and my college band had been the hot-shit band on campus - and we moved to St. Louis. I took a job teaching music at an elementary school, don't ask me why, although I must say I was a good teacher. I had a couple of classrooms of autistic kids and I really liked it. I also formed a band. By then, I was getting more serious about writing my own material and discovering my own voice, out of self-preservation. One time, this young guy who had his own home studio came to see my band. He composed commercials for Budweiser and all these local big businesses, and he said he wanted me to come in and sing a McDonald's commercial. It was a regional spot, but it wound up going network and I made $42,000 for an hour's work, having made $17,000 a year as a teacher. I thought, God, if I can do this in St. Louis, I should try doing it in L.A. But that was part of my naivete.