Шерил Кроу АНУ-ын улс төрийн эмзэг үе, шинэ бүтээлийнхээ талаар ярив

Dividing people, telling people who they should be, who they shouldn’t be, what they should believe, who they should hate,” observes Sheryl Crow of the Trump administration. “We’ve seen this in history, and we’re in a very fragile moment. I’m hoping [the midterms] reveal a desire through our votes to see this change and [to hold people] accountable.”

The American rock star was speaking to me ahead of the US midterm elections, an event that turns out to be a bloodbath for the Republicans who lose control of Congress to the Democrats, and with several states turning blue after years in the red. Crow has been a vocal critic of her country’s president over the years, and in September told her followers that “voting is our best and only option”. After our conversation, when the results make it clear that America wants change, she celebrates with a short statement to Instagram: “America voted for hope and equality for all. That’s what I call patriotism.”

It’s a suitably hopeful moment to speak with one of our greatest living songwriters, whose music frequently melds her signature sunny pop optimism with a harder rock edge, one that spurs you into picking yourself up, dusting yourself off and getting the hell on with it. Thirty years since she reminded us that “Everyday Is a Winding Road” and “A Change Would Do You Good”, she’s still at it – better than ever, in fact – with a new collection of songs about hope, resilience and putting up a fight.

“This music is definitely me working through what we’re all working through, I think, which is this feeling of: why do I feel so alone, and who are we at this moment in our humanity?” Crow says. “It’s really a testimony to the value of human connection.”

Her new project is titled Pick You Up, and it is appropriately uplifting, but also thoughtful and reflective about our uncertain times. She shies away from calling it an album, having initially announced that her 2019 record Threads, featuring duets with Neil Young and Stevie Nicks, would be her last. She then surprised everyone in 2024 with Evolution, having been inspired to write about the dark direction she thought humanity was taking.

Regardless of what you call Pick You Up, though, it contains some of her best songwriting, including the stunning opener “Freight Train”, which was fuelled by childhood memories of hearing the train whistle as it passed through her hometown of Kennett, Missouri, at night. “It’s really interesting getting older,” she tells me (clarifying, with a laugh, “I’m not going to say getting old,”) “because you spend quite a lot of time in reflection.”

It’s hard to believe she’s 64, but Crow has quite the extraordinary life to reflect back on. The nine-time Grammy winner started out as a music teacher, singing in cover bands at weekends, before a local producer helped her make a name for herself writing advertising jingles (she once said she made $40,000 for a jingle she wrote for McDonald’s). She gatecrashed auditions for Michael Jackson’s first solo world tour and, a month later, found herself singing backup to thousands of fans each night for over a year – something she described in a previous interview with The Independent as “a crash course in the music industry”.

By the mid-Nineties, her debut album Tuesday Night Music Club had produced Crow’s first hit, “All I Wanna Do” and earned her three Grammy nominations, including for Best New Artist. Yet she’s on record as stating that her contemporaries in the decade’s male-dominated alt-rock scene shunned her. Instead, she found herself being championed by an old guard that included the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, Prince and Don Henley. Bob Dylan once gave her advice on overcoming writer’s block, while Stevie Nicks and Emmylou Harris contributed backing vocals to her fourth album, C’mon C’mon.

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Now the same age as many of her mentors were when they were handing her advice, Crow recalls a conversation she had with Robert Plant, where the Led Zeppelin rocker told her he believed he was writing some of his best work but feared it wouldn’t be heard “because we’re not in the young demographic”. She doesn’t exactly disagree, but she’s found that idea liberating while writing her latest works: “There’s a joy of going in and not thinking like, ‘Is this going to be a hit?’” she explains. “These songs felt very immediate and inspired by the most interesting conversations in my life – conversations I’ve had with my kids in the kitchen.”

Crow, who relocated from LA to Nashville in 2007, has two sons – Wyatt, 19, and Levi, 16 – both of whom she adopted as a single parent. She says the things they asked about are “not things that would ever have crossed my mind when I was their age. They’re grown-up issues, and they’re complicated”. It’s fascinating to be a singer, she says, “but it’s more fascinating to be a mom.”

She and her sons have talked about the manosphere, those dark spots on the internet where men are told that the bulk of the problems they face – from mental health to low income, employment or their inability to get a girlfriend – are the fault of women and, more specifically, women’s empowerment.

“It’s a pretty powerful and successful device for propaganda, to figure out a way to get into every young male’s phone through algorithms to disseminate some of the most hateful rhetoric towards women that I’ve ever heard,” Crow says. “It’s important for me to say as a mom, ‘It’s not OK. It shouldn’t be normalised.’” Those conversations were what in part inspired her new song, “Freedom Bus”, a dreamy protest song on which she sings: “Whoever said freedom was free/ There ain’t no freedom without history/ And folks who died for you and me/ So don’t be an asshole, let everyone be.”

The manosphere, she believes, is just another way of keeping us divided, and only benefits those in power. “We can’t be fools about this, we really do have to step back and look at who we’re becoming,” she says. She recalls driving home to see her parents and seeing a billboard with a picture of Trump’s face and one of his favoured slogans near their house: “They’re not after me, they’re after you, and I just happen to be standing in their way.”

“That thing sat in the middle of a field in a pretty rural area,” Crow says. “If you’re trying to get into the minds of people who are living their everyday lives, it’s pretty powerful to tell them that somebody who doesn’t agree with you is coming for your freedom.” The rows over transgender rights, gun control, women’s bodies… “all that crap is just tactics of fear,” she continues. “At a certain point, I’m hoping that we will be a little more analytical about the way we’re being taken for fools.” What would be best, she believes, is to “set the phone down and start having conversations”.

You can’t win ’em all, though. Crow isn’t afraid of tough subjects, and there’s only a slight grimace as I ask about her relationship with controversial singer Kid Rock, with whom she has collaborated in the past and once described as a friend. The “All Summer Long” star – real name Robert Ritchie – happens to be one of Trump’s most vocal musical supporters. Crow has called him out previously for a vulgar remark he made about Taylor Swift in 2019, but also spoke of him somewhat fondly in a July interview with Bill Maher, during a conversation about getting along with people who share different beliefs to your own.

“I don’t really see Bobby very much… I know he has a new Christian record out,” she says, carefully. “There are a lot of things about Christianity that I really hold dear, and one of those things is to not judge. Look around, help your community the best you can. The blessing is always in the blessing. So wherever he or anybody else is in their life, I am not going to be judgmental about that, and I’m always open to dialogue.” Like country star Miranda Lambert, with whom she collaborated on a brilliant cover of Loretta Lynn’s “Coalminer’s Daughter”, Crow prefers to take Dolly Parton’s lead instead of sewing more division when it comes to politics.

“I think she made her viewpoints very clear without ever wielding hate or shaming, gaslighting or any of those things that seem to be the norm,” Crow says of the late queen of country, who died in August this year. “She makes me wake up and think, ‘Am I leaving the world a better place than how I found it?’ Because she was able to do that and still be successful and be a badass woman who could outwit or out-sing any man on the planet.” She cracks a grin. “There, I said it! So that’s kind of where I stand with people who are in my life, who choose hateful rhetoric over disseminating that Christian love.”

She’s encouraged by younger artists like Olivia Rodrigo, who threw the inaugural Daisy Chain Fields festival in Irvine, California, in August to celebrate women across the spectrum of music, from Chappell Roan to Stevie Nicks, rapper Doechii and rock band Garbage. Rodrigo was inspired by Sarah McLachlan’s Lilith Fair event – at which Crow performed – in the late Nineties, and used the proceeds raised to go towards charities benefiting women and girls. “Oh my gosh, I love her,” Crow says of the younger star, with whom she has performed with on a few occasions. She presented Rodrigo with a Woman of the Year prize at the Billboard Women in Music Awards in 2022; Rodrigo joined her for a duet of “If It Makes You Happy” when Crow was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a year later.

“I texted her about her doing the festival and said, I can feel you approach the world from that perspective of like, ‘I want to be a good person,’” Crow says. “The fact she invited all these [charities to the festival] to educate the community about the ways they could lift each other up – that’s so powerful. It speaks volumes about her.” She gets excited talking about Rodrigo’s music, too: “Her songwriting is so clever, she’s such a good writer. There are certain people I listen to and go, ‘Gosh, now I want to go home and write… they inspire me.’ And Olivia is one of them.”

Crow namechecks Rodrigo again when I ask who she’d pick to do the 007 song (“she’s so versatile, she’d be amazing”). She famously recorded “Tomorrow Never Dies” for the film of the same name, starring Pierce Brosnan, in 1997, and was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Original Song (losing to Celine Dion’s then omnipresent Titanic theme, “My Heart Will Go On”, by James Horner and Will Jennings). And what about the man himself… who should play Bond next? Crow is an avid fan of British television, and singles out frontrunner Jack Lowden, the star of Apple TV’s thriller series Slow Horses. “He’s just brilliant,” she says. “He’s so versatile and so likeable… I just feel like he’d be so great. Slow Horses is my favourite TV show, it blows my mind.”

A lot has changed across the entertainment industry since Crow’s early days of fame, but she’s taking it in her stride, as usual. “It’s so different now with streaming – I was lucky because I would have songs that were big enough that, even if you didn’t like me, you got exposed to me [on the radio],” she says. “All the stuff on the radio became the soundtrack to your life, but now it’s different, and there is liberation in that because I’m not competing with my last success.” At the same time, she believes that the decision-making has been placed directly in the hands of music fans: “Emmylou Harris always said, ‘It’s my vote.’ Like if I buy your record, I’m voting for you, right?”

Similarly, she’s thrilled that young artists are managing to fill arenas and stadiums again: “That gives me hope because AI can never perform live… people go to concerts because they want the human contact, they want it in their molecules,” she says. “I think our [collective] loneliness is driving us to go stand in a place with strangers and watch people play music that they love.” It takes her right back to her childhood, lying in bed and hearing the freight train, and realising that “every kid in the world” was going through the same thing – trying to sleep and being distracted by the sound of a train or a car passing by.

“There’s something beautiful about us going through the same experiences, the same emotions – from fear to longing to disappointment,” she says. “We don’t go through life alone. We may be in separate beds and separate houses, but we’re not alone. We are connected.”

‘Pick You Up’ by Sheryl Crow is out now