Sheryl Crow has been discussing the rise of female singer-songwriters, many of whom she helped to inspire.
Crow was one of the biggest female artists of the ‘90s. Her debut album alone, 1993’s Tuesday Night Music Club, is estimated to have sold more than eight million copies.
Now, of course, the charts are dominated by female artists, but when Crow was at the peak of her career, she was definitely in a minority.
In a new interview with Variety, Crow says: “I remember having a conversation with people on the Grammys board 15 years ago, saying, ’What are you guys going to do to get instruments into young women’s hands?’ Lo and behold, some of the greatest musicianship right now is young and female.”
Crow goes on to heap praise on the women for whom she blazed a trail: “The calibre of writing is just so good with Chappell Roan, Olivia [Rodrigo] and Phoebe Bridgers, and these women are not just in the studio throwing in a lyric - they play,” she says. “If you want to take a course in great songwriting, go study at the college of Taylor Swift. There’s Brandi [Carlile] and Courtney Barnett. For a long time, there was a dearth of women who were playing and singing and rocking, and now I’m tickled.”
Crow has praised Rodrigo before, and the pair have shared the stage on more than one occasion, including in 2023, when Crow was being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
While she’s happy to see so many female singer-songwriters breaking through, though, Crow accepts that her time in the commercial spotlight is now over. “I feel happy. I feel at peace,” she says. “There isn’t that ’Oh my God, I gotta write a hit song.’ Even if I wrote a hit song, it wouldn’t get played! So now I just wanna write music that feels like I’m glad I wrote it.”
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