REVIEW: Sheryl Crow, The Globe Sessions (A&M)
- Tracey Bleile
When you take storytelling and turn the intensity on yourself, you get autobiography. Set it to music and you have a documentary, complete with a score that gives you the whole range of emotion. But how to keep an honest effort from slipping too far into one extreme - that is the challenge facing Sheryl Crow's newest effort The Globe Sessions . Named for the home studio she created for herself, the songs and feelings on Globe run the gamut, from pain to longing to defiance. But one seems to be conspicuously absent this time out - and it's a biggie - joy. And it's a narrow path to walk when you are trying to communicate your very private feelings to a very public world. When does examining your emotions stop being an important catharsis and turn into a good old-fashioned pity party?
Her big singles of the past have focused on accepting where you are, looking ahead and hoping for the best. Globe Sessions is instead, something of a cliché, the rollercoaster of relationships - as they take place inside of one head and one heart. The first single "My Favorite Mistake" is a slow blues burn (high degree of irony here; as more than a few sources have called this her take on the end of her relationship with Eric Clapton) and proceeds to set (or is it slow) the pace. And while here far more attention paid to creating an enveloping mood, as with the elegance and poetry of "Riverwide" and the defiance and falsely-bright chipperness of the breakup aftermath in "It Don't Hurt", replete with B-3 organ, there is definitely an air of sadness throughout. The inclusion of the Dylan song "Mississippi" (which he had written for his last Grammy-winning album, but decided to give to Crow to sing for this release instead) is a down-home rocker that comes in rather late in the release to redeem the overall maudlin feel.
Her trademark snappy percussive backdrop gives songs like "Maybe That's Something" glimmers of her previously more aggressive style, and her expressive wide-ranging voice makes her one of the more engaging artists to listen to. But even when she pushes harder in her rock 'n roll mode, it is still toned-down and almost queen of country depressing - "Anything But Down", moaning lap-steel guitar solo and all. But for someone who has built a songwriting and performing persona based on a "wild women don't get the blues" philosophy, it is even more difficult to watch a strong person work through their pain, in such a public way.
The arrangements and array of back up musicians are breathtaking (Benmont Tench playing keyboards, Wendy Melvoin on guitar, and Lisa Germano on violin and autoharp; each on several tracks, as well as a host of her faithful session players and long-time band members) and the production value is topknotch, which is her own, and mixed by Tchad Blake. However, if this is progress, I hope this is leading her to a place where she can take all this high-powered energy and direct it towards being happy again. She's got all the ingredients here, but the levitating agent is missing, and the result is somewhat flat. One step left out, and it doesn't matter how beautiful the surface is - it's what's inside that counts.
