FEATURE:
Childhood Treasures: Albums That Impacted Me
Sheryl Crow – The Globe Sessions
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WHILST the three albums I have …
included in this feature so far were in my life when I was a young child or in middle school, Sheryl Crow’s The Globe Sessions arrived when I was in high school. In 1998, her third album was released. I knew about her prior to 1998, though The Globe Sessions was the album that really opened my eyes to her work. Two of her best songs, My Favorite Mistake and There Goes the Neighborhood, are on The Globe Sessions. I am going to bring in a couple of reviews for the album. For me, it arrived at a time when I was entering the final stages of high school. As a fifteen-year-old, I was becoming more open to different kinds of music. I have spoken about The Globe Sessions before. It is an album that scored some positive reviews when it was released – though some were not taken and gave it a bit of a mixed reaction. I really love it, and it holds some very good memories. I love a lot of what Sheryl Crow has produced - although The Globe Sessions’ songs are ones that bring back a time when my musical exploration was widening and deepening. I love Crow’s songwriting and, to me, she is one of the most underrated performers ever. Apart from the singles released from The Globe Sessions, tracks such as It Don't Hurt and Mississippi (a Bob Dylan cover) are phenomenal.
If you have not heard The Globe Sessions, then give it a spin. One of the tragedies is that, in 2019, it was announced that the 2008 fire that burned through Universal Studios Hollywood destroyed buildings belonging to Universal Music Group. It has emerged that The Globe Sessions was one of hundreds of albums to have had their studio masters completely destroyed. This means that any re-releases or reissues is not too likely. That is a real pity. In 2023, we mark twenty-five years of the album. I would have loved to have heard some outtakes or extras added to a reissue. I am going to finish off with some positive reviews for The Globe Sessions. In their assessment, AllMusic had the following to say:
“Since her dense, varied, postmodernist eponymous second album illustrated that Sheryl Crow was no one-album wonder, she wasn't left with as much to prove the third time around. Having created an original variation on roots rock with Sheryl Crow, she was left with the dilemma of how to remain loyal to that sound without repeating herself on her third album, The Globe Sessions. To her credit, she never plays lazy, not when she's turning out Stonesy rockers ("There Goes the Neighborhood") or when she's covering Dylan (the remarkable "Mississippi," an outtake from Time Out of Mind).
However, she has decided to abandon the layered, yard-sale production and pop culture fixations that made Sheryl Crow a defining album of the mid-'90s. The Globe Sessions, instead, is the work of a craftswoman, one who knows how to balance introspective songs with pop/rockers, one who knows how to exploit her signature sound while becoming slightly more eclectic. In that sense, the album is a lot like a latter-day album from her idols, the Stones -- it finds pleasures within the craft and the signature sounds themselves. That means that there are no surprises (apart from the synthesized handclaps, of course). The Celtic homage "Riverwide" may be new, but it's not unexpected, much like how the whiplash transition in "Am I Getting Through" isn't entirely out of the blue. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, since The Globe Sessions has a strong set of songs. Since it lacks the varied sonics, humor, and flat-out weirdness of Sheryl Crow, it's never quite as compelling a listen as its predecessor, yet it is a strong record, again confirming Crow's position as one of the best roots rockers of the '90s”.
Not only does The Globe Sessions provide a nostalgic rush. It is an album that I can play and get something new from. Various songs reveal fresh aspects. That is the mark of a truly great album! It remains very special to me…almost twenty-three years after I first heard it.
I am going to end with a second review for The Globe Sessions. This one is from Entertainment Weekly. They had the following to say about an album that, in my humble opinion, is among the absolute best of the 1990s:
“Crow’s Globe Sessions can be heard as the flip side of Mitchell’s refreshed interest in mass outreach. Coming off of two solid hit albums, Crow now offers music that tries to make its singer-songwriterly confessionalism less specific. The CD is a sustained yearning for privacy, solace, and escape, lest she (as the closing song title has it) ”Crash and Burn.” Produced by Crow and mixed by Tchad Blake, the entire enterprise is filled with clatter and clutter — guitar distortion, radio static, the sound of a phone left pulsing off the hook — that convey a conflicted state of mind about love, fame, and the nagging feeling that she can’t trust anyone’s motives.
”I am scared that I’m weird,” she says on ”Am I Getting Through (Part I & II),” and answers the title question with a muttered, ”I don’t care, I don’t care.” Even when she admits to insecurity, it’s cast as an aside or a pun, as in her watery refrain in ”Riverwide,” ”Don’t bail on me.”
Which isn’t to say that The Globe Sessions is unfocused or not catchy. It leads off with the devilish single ”My Favorite Mistake,” whose bouncy melody almost disguises the fact that the title phrase refers to a wayward lover she can’t quite dump. It’s a measure of how good The Globe Sessions is that I couldn’t pick out the Time Out of Mind outtake Bob Dylan gave her to record until I looked at the credits, and even then, ”Mississippi” still seemed like just a nifty throwaway on an album of crafted keepers. And Crow, by the way, doesn’t get enough credit for a wily sense of humor: Aren’t the lines in ”There Goes the Neighborhood” — ”The photo chick made to look sickly/Is standing in her panties in the shower” — a good description of Fiona Apple’s ”Criminal” video? And how ’bout that ”hidden” final cut, a Dylanly diatribe about the persecution of Bill Clinton?
Inspired by Mitchell, I dug out my tattered college copy of Blake’s ”Songs of Innocence and Experience” and damned if I didn’t almost immediately come upon its message for Sheryl Crow: ”Love seeketh not Itself to please/Nor for itself hath any care/But for another gives its ease/And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.” Or, less eloquently: Your favorite mistake might be a blessing in disguise, Sheryl. The Globe Sessions: A-“.
In future editions, I am going to go further back and explore albums that entered my life at a very young age. I wanted to include this teenage gem, as it came to me at a time when I was looking ahead to leaving high school. The Globe Sessions provides me comfort now…
AS it did back then.