Sheryl Crow has been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as part of the class of 2023. Laura Dern gave the speech inducting Crow into the institution, honoring her friend and recounting her history. Afterward, Crow gave a wide-ranging speech about growing up with rock’n’roll and then performed songs from her catalog with the help of Olivia Rodrigo, Stevie Nicks, and Peter Frampton. Read both Dern and Crow’s speeches below.
Crow was a first-time nominee for the Rock Hall this year; she’s been eligible since 2019. In a social media post about the news, she wrote that she was “BLOWN AWAY” by the honor. She joins Kate Bush, Missy Elliott, George Michael, Willie Nelson, Rage Against the Machine, and the Spinners as this year’s honorees.
At the Rock Hall ceremony, Willie Nelson invited Crow to perform his song “Crazy” together. Later in the evening, she also joined Elton John, Brittany Howard, and Chris Stapleton in singing the Band’s “The Weight” for the in memoriam segment.
Last year, Crow was the subject of a feature-length Showtime documentary about her career, which had a companion double-album soundtrack compiling some of her biggest hits and more recent material. She joins Emmylou Harris and 2022 Rock Hall inductee Dolly Parton on a new version of “You’re No Good,” which appears on Parton’s mid-November LP Rockstar. Her own new album, Evolution, is out in March.
Sheryl Crow:
This is so, so surreal. I’ll tell you really quick, it’s been a crazy couple of days and I took a nap this afternoon, and I dreamt that I was in a station wagon with a bunch of random people trying to figure out where the Rock Hall induction was. This is a little bit like getting an Oscar for a screenplay you haven’t finished writing yet, but for me it’s a huge thrill, and it’s a huge honor, but it’s also a very big honor for me to get to be inducted alongside one of the people I admire most on this planet, and that’s Willie Nelson.
I’m from a really small town called Kent, Missouri, and tonight, my entire town—my town has like three stop lights, one high school, and it has one movie theater, and my town is there tonight with my mom and my dad and my sister watching this livestream. I wanna say I love you all and thank you. Thank you to the rest of my family who traveled very long tonight. Mom and Dad, thank you so much for raising me the way you did. Thank you for loving music and for playing everything from Stan Kenton to Duke Ellington to Burt Bacharach to Dionne Warwick to James Taylor to Carole King to Stevie Wonder to Elton John. I love you, and I’m thankful for all the years of unconditional love and for piano lessons as well.
I’m one of the most blessed people I know to get to be mom to Wyatt and Levi, my two songs. I wanna thank my two boys who are the greatest gift God has given me, and I gotta say, I was very happy with whatever God gave me. But I’m so happy to be raising boys. With social media and all, you know. Anyway, there’s nothing that can compare to the joy and love you’ve given my life, and nothing I do means anything without you guys.
I have to say, I had a beautiful thank you speech that came in around seven and a half hours. I’m just gonna say a brief thank you that encompasses a lot of people. The people that started out with me 30 years ago are still here. They are my manager, my business manager, my lawyer, my agent, I mean all of these people have stuck with me through the whole journey. I always say that all my friends are on my payroll, and it’s kind of true, and I always say that if anybody leaves me I’ll have to have ’em killed because they know where the bodies are buried. But I wanna say, I’ve had the same manager from the very beginning, and his name is Scooter Weintraub. He’s famous after my documentary. He’s a wonderful person and he’s always put what’s best for me before money, and that just speaks volumes. I wanna thank Pam, also, who basically manages Scooter.
And to all the musicians and the crews that have traveled with me for the last 36 years, you are family. We have been through cancer together, we have been through raising babies, we’ve been through divorces, we’ve lost people along the way. That’s what music has brought me; it’s been the most incredible journey. When I think about the years playing music and my journey, I could not have dreamed my life.
When I was growing up, our popularity wasn’t based on likes, it was based on who had the best record collection and who threw the best parties when their parents were out of town. There was no social media because there were no computers, no internet, no cell phones. There was Rolling Stone magazine and Creem magazine. That’s where you found the mythical glimpses into rock stardom. There was American Bandstand and Soul Train and Midnight Special where you could catch your favorite artists playing their latest hits.
I was a kid who dreamed rock’n’roll, who pored over album covers, who knew the name of every music on every album, and I found the lyrics for the songs I was sure were written for me. Like I was sure James Taylor wrote “Fire and Rain” about me and for me. Stevie Nicks, I honestly would not be who I am without her and I felt certain as a kid that because I could twirl a baton and have wavy blonde hair that we were probably related somehow. I found my command of words through her imagery and her melodies. I also found myself in the greats like Tina Turner and Bonnie Raitt and Nancy Wilson, who with their ability to front a band with electric guitars showed me the way. I sang Linda Ronstadt songs into a curling iron like all the greats before me. I found a way out of my own loneliness through Joni Mitchell’s poetry, and there have been so many musicians who have brought me here, most of whom are in the Rock Hall already.
Music’s been a way out of my hometown and into a world of possibility. In 1976, you guys, when I was 14, my best friend Jo Beth’s mom drove us—me and six other little girls— to the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, Tennessee to see Peter Frampton. That was my first experience at a rock’n’roll show. The six of us were way up in the nosebleeds section, and we managed to crawl all the way down to the floor. I smelled weed for the first time, I got to sing along with tens of thousands of strangers to “Do You Feel Like I Do.” And who doesn’t dream of that being your life after you’ve experienced it? It was a pivotal moment for me, and understanding what Carlos Santana said about music changing the molecules—how music can connect a whole roomful of strangers on a cosmic journey that cannot be without the collective experience.
My kids always say, “Mom, you know you were born in the 1870s.” And I did grow up before technology became a connector and a divider and an anesthetizer and distractor and a facilitator. I grew up before 24-hour news, before drug companies could advertise on TV—that’s how old I am. I grew up with Walter Cronkite and the nightly news, and until 1975, when I was 13 years old, each evening we watched the caskets come off the planes and read the names scrolled across the TV of those lost and missing in Vietnam. The music from that time reflected what was happening in the world. It gave voice to everyone who was experiencing this, particular the younger generation. Those songs that played on the radio—Marvin Gaye, Buffalo Springfield, Creedence Clearwater—that’s what music does. It entertains us, but it also makes us feel.
In my case, music took me to Japan, it took me to Berlin before the wall fell, it took me to Russia, and it even took me to Israel. It’s unimaginable that a song with as many words as “All I Wanna Do” would have people who don’t even speak English as a second language trying to capture every word. Music is a universal gift that we all share, and seeing those places definitely gave me perspective to how good we have it here in America. I wanna leave you guys with a quote from the great Jimmy Buffett, who I know we all miss. He said if you love what you do, you will never work a day of your life. Yes, there have been ups and downs in my story, but mine is a story of infinite possibility for any young person setting out on a musical journey. I love the work. Thank you guys so much.
Laura Dern:
And now I have the privilege to pay tribute to a legendary artist, poet, activist, friend, mother, daughter, and all around badass goddess rock star, Ms. Sheryl Crow. There’s a reason we feel the connections we do to Sheryl’s storytelling. She lets you in with an open vulnerability and a reverence and love that guides you to access yourself in ways you haven’t before. She guides you home, and she also helps you reflect on those way-stations we call home in our lives. From teacher to backup singer, this hardest-working woman I know evolved into the profound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and producer we love.
When she began, the business wasn’t sure what to do with this raw, Southern female rock guitar playing singer-songwriter. But in a very short time, her songs were at the top of the charts with pop icons. Her first venture, Tuesday Night Music Club, introduced us to “All I Wanna Do,” “Strong Enough,” “Leaving Las Vegas,” and, with her next record, “Everyday Is a Winding Road,” “If It Makes You Happy,” and “A Change Would Do You Good.” She has continued to give us songs like “First Cut Is the Deepest,” “Soak Up the Sun,” “My Favorite Mistake,” and “The Difficult Kind.”
She mapped out the chapters of our lives and has continued to be the multi-generational muse to everything we feel, always discovering a newness to reflect on in herself and in us. With success became massive sales and numerous awards, but for Sheryl, she makes art because she has to. For her, success has never been measured outside herself. The resonant impact of her music is evident by the artists who have chosen to cover her songs, including Prince, Tina Turner, Johnny Cash, Phoebe Bridgers, and Brandi Carlile.
Brandi asked me to say “hey” and share: “Sheryl Crow really is, at the end of the day, one of the greatest fucking rock stars of the last 100 years. Great rock stars create other rock stars, and burn through boundaries and roadblocks. There’s no path for someone like me without Sheryl Crow. To say she blazed the trail for generations of women in music would be the understatement of the century.
Now, Sheryl talked about how as a young girl, she’d lay on her living room floor and listen to records by the greats who reside in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Well the embrace she has received from these artists is dreamlike, recording and performing collaboration with Dylan, Clapton, the Stones, Dolly, Emmylou, Smokey Robinson, and the hero and legend we get to honor this very night, Mr. Willie Nelson.
I was personally blessed to be hang out in the studio to watch the collaboration between Sheryl and the incredible Stevie Nicks as Sheryl produced her record. It was the first experience I had ever had watching two women in the same profession championing each other while being in charge of their own creative destiny. Sheryl uses her voice as a longtime human rights and climate activist and I have also watched a vulnerable bravery like I have never known or seen as Sheryl went through breast cancer treatment, and I watched her transform her own experience and gained knowledge into advocacy to help heal so many other women.
She is a fierce lover of life, her children, her family, and humanity. She’s the kind of friend, when you need support, she just moves you into her house. Literally, I can tell you. Also, isn’t a prerequisite of being inducted that you start out playing bars and half to have a server smash a tray of beers into your mic and knock your teeth out? Because if so, she’s checked that box, too. My kind of rock star. She is an extraordinary gift to music, a family member to me, and our lives are forever shaped and inspired by her words. Like Sheryl says, it’s not having what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got. And now, I get the incredible honor of welcoming Sheryl Crow to her righteous place in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
