"They put it on hold so nobody else can record it. But he didn’t actually record it. That was when Don Henley said, ‘You need to quit giving your songs away’”: Sheryl Crow says that she once wrote a song for Eric Clapton that never saw the light of day

Songwriting can be a tough business. You might write a song you’re happy with and shop it around the industry, only to find that it never gets recorded by anyone but you can’t have it back for yourself.

Now it turns out that this is exactly happened to no lesser tunesmith than Sheryl Crow. Speaking to Esquire, she reveals that, before she became a recording artist herself, she pitched a song that ended up with Eric Clapton.

“He was going to record it, so they put it on hold so nobody else can record it. But he didn’t actually record it,” Crow explains. And because Clapton had claimed the song, she couldn’t then offer it to someone else.

What seemed like a disappointment may actually have been for the best in the long run, though, as a bit of advice from another musical legend helped to convince Crow to strike out on her own.

“That was when Don Henley said, ‘You need to quit giving your songs away. And if you’re serious about this, you need to hold on to your songs for yourself.’”

Crow had previously sung backing vocals for Henley. Famously, she also performed that role on Michael Jackson’s Bad tour, often taking the Siedah Garrett parts during showstopping ballad I Just Can’t Stop Loving You.

As for Crow and Clapton, their relationship didn’t seem to suffer. In fact, they’re believed to have dated in the late 1990s after Crow had shot to fame herself, and there were rumours that her 1998 single My Favorite Mistake was written about the guitar legend.

Crow would later deny this, though - in fact, she and Clapton actually went on to perform the song together - and she’s still not revealing who the inspiration was. “There’s one person that knows. My manager,” she told Esquire. “He’s been with me since the beginning of time, so he pretty much knows where all the dead bodies are buried.”

The rest of us will just have to keep guessing, though: “I’m just not going to tell people who my songs are about,” Crow confirms.