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The official Sheryl Crow thread; New album "Be Myself"
Topic Started: Jan 13 2008, 11:08 PM (2,399 Views)
Riverwide
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I'm sure "Doctor My Eyes" will leak seperately anyway!
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Pera
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I'm listening Detours now, so far I like Gasoline and Out Of Our Heads is catchy but not sure if I like it
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When I first heard "Out Of Our Heads", I was like WTF?? I love it now though!

"Gasoline" is great too. It's so TNMC!
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how is it compared to Wildflower? (not enough posts to see the file yet)
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Personally, I think I prefer it to Wildflower. I think it's much more consistent and grittier. It harks back to the first few albums, which is a very, very good thing.
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It sounds more pop than any album she made before, I'm surprised by the lack of electric guitars
Listening to Now That You're Gone now, it's really nice :)
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Hmm, some of it is quite "pop" alright, but some of it is quite raw too. I love the variety in it.

For me, it's her best album since The Globe Sessions.
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I'm not sure about comparing it to her early albums, it sounds different from everything she did before
Interesting vocals on 'Diamond Ring', not her style at all
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Some of the stuff is *very* reminiscent of the "Tuesday Night Music Club" sound in my opinion. This isn't really a surprise, what with the welcome return of Bill Bottrell.

I think the best way to describe it is as a mish-mash of everything she's ever done, with a little experimentation too.
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Make It Go Away (Radiation Song) is awful :vomit:
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I love it. Sheryl Crow doesn't do "awful" songs.
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really, not ever half of C'mon C'mon ? :drama:
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Nah. "C'mon, C'mon" is my least favourite album, but there aren't any awful songs on it. It just wasn't anywhere near as good as she normally is.
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Still abstaining, but from the clips "Make It Go Away" was my favourite.

Just thought I'd share. *twiddles thumbs*
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Mattress
Jan 29 2008, 11:40 PM
Still abstaining, but from the clips "Make It Go Away" was my favourite.

Just thought I'd share. *twiddles thumbs*

Download! Download! :wink:
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[REVIEW] DETOURS - ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE

By Anthony Decurtis

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," John Lennon sang, and that lyric could stand as the theme of Detours, the powerful new Sheryl Crow album. What happened in Crow's case — the collapse of her engagement to Lance Armstrong ("Diamond Ring"), a bout with breast cancer ("Make It Go Away") and a world in meltdown ("Shine Over Babylon") — is intense but far from a laugh riot. "Now That You're Gone" and "Love Is All There Is" are the sort of big pop singles Crow is known for. For the most part, though, Detours is a relatively stripped-down affair.

The album was produced by Bill Bottrell, who also oversaw Crow's multi­platinum 1993 debut, Tuesday Night Music Club. Each track assumes its own sonic identity. "Peace Be Upon Us" mingles lush Arabic elements and psychedelic effects; "God Bless This Mess" features Crow accompanying herself on acoustic guitar and sounds as raw as a demo. The easy swing of "Love Is Free" balances the jittery rhythms and schoolyard chants of "Out of Our Heads." What holds these fourteen songs together is Crow's unwavering emotional commitment. She confronts both personal and political terrors, and emerges hopeful — getting where she needs to go, despite the detours.

Rating: 3 1/2 stars out 5
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Slant Magazine

Though her track record as an album artist isn't as unblemished as some, including the Recording Academy, would have us believe (though not bad, The Globe Sessions was a disappointment following its self-titled predecessor, and C'mon C'mon was MOR pap at its most painful), Sheryl Crow remains a consistently impressive singles artist. From her charmingly belligerent debut, "Leaving Las Vegas," to 2005's lush, quietly contemplative "Good Is Good," Crow hasn't released a lead single I haven't loved. That streak, it seems, would be broken by the singer-songwriter's hippy anthem "Love Is Free," which chugs along like a well-oiled parade float but is a little too cute-n'-bouncy for its source material (the failed federal response to Hurricane Katrina), if not for a technicality: The single was preceded by the airplay-only "Shine Over Babylon," a more sobering take on current events that is sonically closer to "If It Makes You Happy" than "Soak Up the Sun."

What both songs have in common, however, is a roots-rock foundation and musical palette that harks back to Crow's Tuesday Night Music Club, an obviously decided move given that Detours reunites Crow with producer Bill Bottrell for the first time since her debut. The reunion was well worth the 15-year wait, as many of the songs on Detours rank among Crow's best. Bottrell's playful guitar melody dances beneath and between Crow's lead vocal on the sweet "Drunk with the Thought of You," while the tight, multi-part harmonies of the title track hint at the country record Crow has threatened to make. There's a grittiness to the music and a scratchy, lived-in quality to Crow's vocals that's been missing from her last couple of albums, and the rough edges are becoming.

References to the current political climate inform the first half of Detours, with barbed jabs at the Bush administration both obvious ("The president spoke words of comfort with teardrops in his eyes/Then he led us as a nation into a war based on lies," Crow snaps on the opening song, "God Bless This Mess") and slightly more veiled ("Freedoms etched on sacred pillars…Can lead to madman oil drillers," she sings on "Babylon"). Crow imagines a not-so-distant future where dissent is commonplace and gasoline is free ("Gasoline") and she makes it known how she feels about our nation's privileged slackers ("Motivation"). But "Out of Our Heads" is the record's keynote address, a thumping rally cry with a fervent vocal, a singsong choir chorus, and a message of hope that's genuine and affecting; the anthemic song would be a good fit for the Obama campaign.

On their own, the political songs would render Detours Important, but Crow has managed the nearly impossible: recording an album that's as intensely personal as it is fiercely political. If love resulted in Wildflower, her most extraordinarily beautiful—and extraordinarily slept-on—album, then credit the dissolution of that love for what could be Crow's most heartbreakingly personal work to date. Her break-up with Lance Armstrong shades much of the album's second, even stronger half, most overtly on "Diamond Ring," which gives listeners a startlingly frank glimpse into the couple's unraveling: "I blew up our love nest/By making one little request." Then, at song's end, she admits plainly: "Diamond ring fucks up everything." "Make It Go Away (Radiation Song)" paints a portrait of a woman taking stock of her life while laying on a table and awaiting radiation treatment, with the specter of Madam Butterfly—a character who unknowingly, tragically entered into an impermanent union—overseeing the procedure. "Was love the illness, and disease the cure?" Crow asks. That her connection to Armstrong deepened and expanded upon learning she had breast cancer shortly after they split only deepened and expanded the scope, honesty, and profundity of her work.

4 out of 5 stars
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[REVIEW] DETOURS - L.A. TIMES

The singer's latest effort explores deeper, more personal themes without sacrificing her pop-sheen craftsmanship.

By Ann Powers, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

February 3, 2008
Sheryl Crow "Detours" (A&M) *** ½ out ****

THERE'S a concept in psychology of the "good-enough mother" -- the exemplary caregiver who satisfies a child's needs without smothering budding independence. Today's stressed-out parents have turned to this 1950s ideal of relaxed but sensitive nurturing again, almost as an alibi. A "good-enough" mom deserves praise even if she doesn't purée her own baby food. In fact, as rampant consumerism, shrinking resources and reality-TV psychosis cast us all as competitors, the phrase "good enough" has become a general salve.

Sheryl Crow is one star who embodies this ideal -- a "good-enough" mother for us all. For 15 years, her singles have provided radio with basic nutrition, and her albums have consistently settled around No. 3 on the charts. Her new "Detours" disc (due in stores Tuesday) is a carefully designed midlife highlight, musically varied and lyrically audacious. Yet it remains true to Crow's consummately casual artistry.

Dogged at first by accusations that she was just an Eliza Doolittle, trained to jump by talented men, Crow has proven her mettle so many times that her unique position is now taken for granted. She may be the most successful woman rocker ever, with the most consistently auspicious career. But she's still often dismissed as merely competent.

It's a trick. Crow is indeed eminently capable; her Beatles-based songwriting is tight as a drum, her former session-singer's voice cracks only on cue, and her deceptively loose-sounding arrangements make ear candy of the traditional structures she loves. Putting craft first, she's been modest about articulating a larger vision. She has one, though, and on "Detours," she gives it more room.

Crow's hits aren't heroic. Leave the chest-pounding to the divas, and the world-conquering to the arena boys: Crow has carved out her niche within the overlooked commonplace world, creating an oeuvre that's all about imperfection, failure and striving despite (often within) self-doubt.

Her masterpieces are ballads such as "Strong Enough" and "If It Makes You Happy," inward-looking expressions of pain that hold out just enough hope to keep love possible. Her vocal delivery, the way she paces the leap to falsetto on a chorus or pushes toward a yell midphrase, is what brings their ambivalence to life.

Her breezier songs express the same complex view of life as a series of downs made tolerable by more fleeting ups. Two of her biggest recent hits, 2002's "Soak Up the Sun" and 2005's "Steve McQueen," exemplify Crow's way of turning an arched eyebrow toward rock's liberationist bravado. The first is anti-consumerist bubblegum, its slacker-righteous lyrics disguised by Crow's shiny, multitracked vocals. "Steve McQueen" adds a dollop of weariness to the classic road song, with Crow riding a Texas bar-band riff toward Thelma-and-Louise-style oblivion.

The albums that bore these hits were decent successes, but Crow still hasn't made that career-topping work that sends long-lived artists toward legend status.

"Detours" is that attempt, a bold album that puts Crow's convictions -- and her chops as a singer and songwriter -- front and center. A reunion with producer Bill Bottrell, who helmed her debut, and a response to the intense public scrutiny she endured during her romance with cycling champ Lance Armstrong, it foregrounds musical risk-taking and lyrical truth-telling. It's a move toward the territory of the heroic, and occasionally swells into grandiosity. But to Crow's credit, she can't let go of her qualifiers and her doubts.

Coming after a series of life-shaking events -- a battle with breast cancer, the split from Armstrong, single motherhood through adoption -- "Detours" is being sold as one of Crow's most personal albums. There's a plain-spoken lullaby for her son. There are a couple of kiss-offs thrown toward Armstrong; the best is a glammy vamp that would have been perfect for Bottrell's other former protégé, Shelby Lynne.

"Make It Go Away" eerily invokes radiation therapy, and Crow sings it with wrenching clarity as a click track conjures the horrible tedium of illness. Crow definitely laid herself out in these songs, though the greater sense of intimacy may simply be a result of her time in the tabloids with Armstrong, which clothed her in the faux-accessibility of celebrity. As a singer, she's always been great at hitting nerves. That doesn't change just because we're now supposed to believe they're her own.

What feels most real is Crow's political conviction. Some of Crow's role models, such as John Mellencamp and Neil Young, have transformed themselves into fervent polemicists, and "Shine Over Babylon," the first single from "Detours," suggests that Crow might be headed in that direction: An environmentalist jeremiad with a furiously sweeping hook, it's the opposite of subtle. But elsewhere, she turns her big statements into party songs, a twist that alleviates the weight of the lyrics and turns that gift for ambiguity into a sneaky consciousness-raising tool.

"Love Is Free" confronts the horrors of post-Katrina Louisiana; its countrified jauntiness goes down easy, but with a bitter tang. "Peace Be Upon Us" calls for tolerance by incorporating Arabic elements into what could be a Bangles song. "Motivation" resurrects the satire of "Soak Up the Sun," poking fun at famous boys in $100 T-shirts and the girls who admire them, as a sliding guitar line and a popcorn drum part push the shoppers along.

Crow's progressive lyrics hit like rubber-band pings fired by some joker in the back row at school. No one is likely to sing her verses at a march on Washington. But by addressing serious issues in the language of pop, they remind us that political speech and casual breeze-shooting can and do often intersect.

These lighter-toned takes on the state of the world let Crow take pride in the everyday tone that she's mastered. They're interrupted now and then by love songs -- the one in which she plays a smitten ingénue is harder to buy than the one about her "paper-thin heart." Better than either are the two offhand ballads in which Crow goes into a tiny private moment and gently extracts its essence.

The one that opens "Detours" is a character song; the other closes it, and it's all Crow's. Both are simply arranged to highlight her conversational singing. "God Bless This Mess" imagines a telemarketer trying to understand how the fallout from 9/11 cracked apart her unremarkable life; it's two minutes of telling, taciturn sadness.

"Lullaby for Wyatt" is Crow's love song to her son, and what's beautiful about it is her frank uncertainty about how to guide this little creature through such a messed-up world. "You are mine, for a time," Crow breathes as her baby cries in the background, a good-enough mother already realizing that she's going to have to let go.

ann.powers@latimes.com

Albums are rated on a scale of four stars (excellent) to one star (poor).

Rating: 3 1/2 stars out 4

Source: Los Angeles Times (www.latimes.com)
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in true Sheryl style, I like the album better with each listen. I do feel like this cd is more like her looking back at the past 15 years and paying homages to each album instead of a new sound
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nothingfails
Feb 2 2008, 03:13 AM
in true Sheryl style, I like the album better with each listen. I do feel like this cd is more like her looking back at the past 15 years and paying homages to each album instead of a new sound

I *completely* agree with that actually! So many songs sound like they're from the TNMC era, right up to Wildflower. It's so cool!
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