She’s endured life-threatening illnesses, crazed stalkers, and a doomed relationship with Lance Armstrong. But you won’t hear Sheryl Crow crying on her new country album, Feels Like Home.

On Sheryl Crow’s farm, sipping PG Tips in the singer’s home, there are many things to discuss. Things such as this 50-acre spread half-an-hour’s drive from Nashville, the result of a 20-year career in which she has sold upwards of 35 million records. Or her new album, which is the nine-times-Grammy-winner’s first country collection. Or her battles with breast cancer and a brain tumour. Or the two sons the 52-year-old adopted as a single mother seven and four years ago.

‘We had some very big, fundamental differences’

But first, there’s a boil to lance: Crow’s former fiance, Lance Armstrong. The couple dated for almost three years between 2003 and 2006. Ancient –– and brief –– history. But the shadow cast by the super-cyclist’s much-belated admission of illegal doping is long. And the memory of his televised “confession” to Oprah Winfrey a year ago feels fresh.

Is it, I wonder, frustrating to Crow that she is forever dragged back into the controversy surrounding her ex? “Yeah, I get tethered to that,” she says evenly. “I was talking about it with a friend. I guess if I was married to a famous person, perhaps I wouldn’t get asked about it. And she said, ‘No, you’re a woman, and people always want to know what you’re wearing and what was he like.’”

But were her suspicions about doping perhaps part of the reason they split?

Crow –– friendly, relaxed, hospitable — pauses briefly before replying. “Oh, you know,” she says with a hint of a sigh, “I couldn’t talk about any of that stuff. Mainly because it’s just a part of my past and there were other things that were much more problematic about the whole situation. There were a lot of things that fed into us not being together, like there are in every relationship. We just had some very big, fundamental differences.”

This time last year Crow was dragged into the controversy by comments from Betsy Andreu, wife of Armstrong’s ex-teammate Frankie Andreu. In her opinion, Crow must have known something. The whistleblower who exposed the seven-times Tour de France winner said: “Sheryl was by his side when he was trying to destroy people and she said nothing. That’s unconscionable. It just astounds me.”

I wonder if Crow had any closure after Armstrong went on television with Oprah. She mutters something indistinguishable, then says: “I don’t need closure from any of that. He holds no relevance to my life. Even answering questions I have to, like” –– Crow, who previously dated Eric Clapton and actor Owen Wilson, claps her thighs –– “…I have to, like, dig. Pretty much my life exists right this second, and my boys are the first thing I think of [in the morning], the last thing I think of at night, and past relationships with famous people or not famous people, with good people, with bad people, with tortured, confused people –– every relationship has served a purpose in my life.”

If anything, the whole experience vividly demonstrated Crow’s own winner’s instinct. Splitting with the world’s most famous cancer survivor a week before being diagnosed herself is an irony that might have floored many people. To fight grave illness not once but twice, then start a family on her own –– that takes some strength.

“A friend of mine is a very intuitive person. He says we all have this propensity for telling a story about ourselves. And the story I always told was that I’d do what was expected: I’d fall in love, I’d get married, I’d have a happy home, I’d have kids. Everything would be served up in that order. And that story you tell about yourself can be the very story that limits you. Letting go of what it is your life is supposed to look like sometimes is the most liberating moment you will ever have.”

She thinks, then, that you have to “let go of it and say, ‘you know what, maybe my life is not gonna happen in the order I thought it would’. As soon as I did that, I had the opportunity to adopt my first son. So sometimes it’s not about this picture you paint about what your life is supposed to look like. Certainly I wouldn’t have painted in some of the experiences I’ve had, like breast cancer. But those are the experiences that have redefined my life.”

‘I’ve attracted people who are very, ah, challenged’

As to Sheryl Crow’s new story, it’s all in Feels Like Home. Her eighth studio album is the sound of the woman from small-town Missouri regrouping and going back to her roots. She sounds all the better, more relaxed, for it. On an album of grown-up country music, pitched between pre-Red album Taylor Swift and young talent Kacey Musgraves, Crow sounds in her entertaining comfort zone.

She’s been out of the spotlight for a while, and has been reluctantly and gingerly embracing the social media requirements of modern PR. She admits she’s no natural Twitter user, and decries a culture where Internet trolls are everywhere. “I had a song come out –– it was in reference to a Hank Williams tribute record –– and somebody blogged that it sounded like someone being raped in an open field.”

She shakes her head. “It was so heinous. I sobbed. I never read that stuff, but I happened to catch that one thing. And I sobbed — and it wasn’t even what he said. It was the hatred. And we’ve given everybody the opportunity to have an anonymous platform. We’ve given them momentum — and a community with which to associate. It used to be that if you were like that, you might be an outsider. Now everybody has found their people –– who are haters.”

She’s had trouble with stalkers, too. “I’ve had to testify against people. I had one guy commit suicide,” she says, before moving quickly on. “It’s really difficult. I’ve attracted people who are very, ah, challenged.”

Crow now seems to have found peace. After 21 years in Los Angeles, she relocated to Nashville, a three-hour drive from where she grew up, six years ago.

Moving back south was part of Crow reconnecting with her roots, a move in part spurred by her first illness. “Getting diagnosed with breast cancer was such a game-changer. Up to that point I had just been… I don’t want to stay on the run, but definitely constantly moving. I had never put roots down. And I grew up in such a small town where everybody was connected. Once I got breast cancer I felt like I’m not connected to anything.”

‘I really started to lose faith in humankind’

In early 2006, Crow had a lumpectomy, then a course of radiation therapy. She thinks that coming back home contributed, “hands down”, to her recovery. It put her in a better place, in every sense of the phrase.

“It was such a weird thing to go from my private life and my relationship falling apart, then getting diagnosed six days later. Then having paparazzi move in right outside my house [in LA]. I couldn’t leave my house –– it was like being barricaded. Because everybody wanted a picture of me at my lowest point.”

They wanted the money shot of her looking bald and gaunt? “Yeah, and devastated. I had a moment where I really started to lose faith in humankind, the fact that that’s what sells and that’s what we want to consume. So after that I just was like: I’m leaving this. I’m not gonna be a part of that any more. And I moved here. And knock on wood,” she says, knocking on an antique coffee table, “there’s no paparazzi in Nashville. At all.” Really? Not even thanks to Taylor Swift? She shakes her head. “Nicole Kidman lives here. And there’s no paparazzi.”

As for her meningioma, which was discovered in mid-2012, she says it’s a slow-growing and benign tumour. But has she talked to her sons (Wyatt, almost seven, and Levi, almost four) about her illnesses? She shakes her head. Even Wyatt is too young. “He doesn’t know about that. I mean, the idea of a breast, he doesn’t really conceptualise that. He recently asked me if I put a bathing suit on in the shower!” she laughs. “I’m like, ‘OK, we’re at that point now! No more showers with mommy!’”

They’re growing up fast. Crow admits she’s already thinking ahead to the teenage years, and how she’ll protect her boys. “The images we see across the board are so sex-driven that it’s confusing for young girls and boys. And I think it’s confusing for men –– men my age feel like they have to be with somebody whose skin is perfect in order to feel like they’re youthful. That’s probably an age-old thing.

“But I definitely think that the images of women and, particularly, teenagers are geared so much older. Teenagers look like they’re in their twenties.”

It’s not just the rutting Rihannas and twerking Mileys of this modern world that give her pause. “Even Beyonce, ” she begins. “I was sitting with my eight-year-old niece, and she was watching the [Super Bowl] half-time –– and I love Beyonce, she’s amazing. I’ve thought of her as a really good role model. And when I watched the dancing I started thinking, that….” She stutters and frowns. “My niece was watching it and trying to do the moves. And it’s like, you’re using your... you know, your sexual parts as part of the dance to kind of like... it’s just odd.” Crow slaps her thighs. “I guess it’s the same as when Elvis (Presley) stepped in and started moving his hips. There’s no way to shield your kids from sex. But when it becomes such the norm, how do you tell your kids you’ve got plenty of time?”

As for another relationship? “Umm, I’m not right now. But you know, I’m always open,” she beams.

Craig McLean
(The Daily Telegraph)
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