To start the process of making what would become her latest album, Threads, Sheryl Crow called up some friends. Not just any friends: fellow rock stars Maren Morris and Stevie Nicks joined her for “Prove You Wrong,” a thumping, country-infused song that is a show of muscle for its rollicking energy as much as for its personnel. It’s also an appropriate opening track for what Crow has been describing as her last album, a cross-generational tapestry of songs with artists she has admired and worked with over her nearly three-decade career.
This is no farewell tour, though, for a nine-time Grammy winner who’s carved out a career across multiple corners of rock; she’ll continue to make music and release it as it makes sense, and work with other artists at her home studio in Nashville. Over tea at the Beekman hotel in Manhattan, hours before her recent concert at the nearby Pier 17, Crow was quick to speak in experiences and lessons, but also in jokes. “I’m of the generation of people who actually bought albums,” she said. “That sounds like a million years old, but I guess by today’s standards, I am a million years old.”
She’s aiming to tie up the album phase of her career and, in so doing, say something about where she’s been and who she’s been there with. “It just feels like a nice, neat, and tidy way to wrap up a 30-year-career of the tradition of making full artistic statements, which is basically what I grew up with,” Crow said. “The album has been a way for me to honor that, and honor all those musicians that ignited something in me.” Among those musicians featured on Threads are—deep breath—Mavis Staples, Bonnie Raitt, Keith Richards, Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Brandi Carlile, Chuck D, St. Vincent, Eric Clapton, Johnny Cash, in a posthumous contribution recorded in 2003, but not released until now, and more. “As I had a song that I felt would work,” Crow said, “I would just reach out to people.”
Crow has never lacked for heavyweight admirers ever since she first broke through with her 1993 debut album Tuesday Night Music Club. Even as her fizzing alt-country and folk music was framed by largely male critics as adult-contemporary fare, or “lightweight,” as Crow herself remembered it with a knowing laugh, her fellow musicians took notice. “When I reflect on my career, which I don’t [allow myself] to do very often, the fact that in my earliest days, instead of being embraced by my peers and the grunge scene and what was happening at the time when I was coming out—I was kind of pooh-poohed. But I was embraced by my heroes. The first year I got to sit in with the Rolling Stones, and I got to sit in with Bob Dylan, and just being able to look back on all of that and being able to pull it all back full circle for this album, it’s felt like, Okay, this is what this is.”
“I think people threw me into the pop thing because the singles that came out were more pop-oriented,” she said later. “But then what wound up happening is I found myself in this other thing that was more incredible than I would have imagined.”
What the Stones and Dylan were and are to Crow, she has, in some ways, been to a younger generation of musicians. Kacey Musgraves recorded her stunning 2018 album, Golden Hour, at Crow’s Nashville studio, and the two have performed together, like in this video, in which Crow joins Musgraves while she’s covering “If It Makes You Happy.” Per a 2018 Stereogum headline, “‘If It Makes You Happy’ Is (Still) Having A Moment.” Maggie Rogers and Sharon Van Etten have performed it together; so have Phoebe Bridgers, Conor Oberst, and Sophie Allison from Soccer Mommy.
No wonder: It’s a radio hit, an instant karaoke classic, and peppered with indelible turns of phrase. “Soak Up the Sun” too: “My friend the communist holds meetings in his R.V. / I can’t afford his gas, so I’m stuck here watching TV”; “I’m gonna soak up the sun while it’s still free.” Crow is insistently self-deprecating in conversation, but even she can admit to that. Discussing the contentious circumstances of her debut album, which led to a public dispute with her collaborators over songwriting credits and publishing royalties, she said, “Everybody made a ton of money on it, you know?” She paused before adding, “So I’m like, If it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad there?”
Perhaps because she’s such an incisive lyricist, Crow said that her songwriting had at times become too effective of an outlet. “For the better part of a year, I didn’t play an instrument,” she said of a break from music she took a few years ago.
“If the thing that you love is also the thing that you hide behind,” Crow continued. “It becomes a crutch, and I just thought, If I keep going to music, I keep going to being productive, I’m going to write a great record out of this. I’m going to go and write songs. And I just said, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to go to my instruments. I’m not going to go to a notepad. I’m just going to be quiet. I’m going to sit with this until I’m done with it.”
That’s not what the break Crow will take now is about though. She recalled being in New Orleans to record her second album in the mid-’90s, and going to meet Dylan at a show of his. “I walked backstage,” Crow said, “and he’s like, ‘Hey, did you bring your accordion?’ And I said no, and we sent a taxi back to get my accordion.”
“Any time I can give an opportunity to somebody to come play, to come write, to sit in,” she continued. “Those were the moments in my career that not only upped my game, but forever registered in my psyche.”
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