FEATURE:
It's Apropos of Everything…
Sheryl Crow’s Amazing Debut Album, Tuesday Night Music Club, At Thirty
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WHEN it came out…
IN THIS PHOTO: Sheryl Crow circa 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Karjean Levine/Getty Images
on 3rd August, 1993, Sheryl Crow’s debut album, Tuesday Night Music Club, introduced me to an artist I have loved ever since. As the singles from the album were released after 3rd August, I think my first exposure was the entire work. All I Wanna Do is the best-known cut from the album, but it also has the majestic Run, Baby, Run and Leaving Las Vegas. Perhaps not as celebrated and heralded as Sheryl Crow’s eponymous 1996 follow-up, Tuesday Night Music Club is still one of the very best debut albums of the 1990s. I have been a Crow fan ever since. All I Wanna Do eventually reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100, propelling the album to number three on the US Billboard 200 albums chart. I think that moment (in 1994) was when Sherly Crow became a household name. The album that started it all, she has continued to put out terrific music since. Her latest album, 2019’s Threads, might be her last - but we really hope it is not! Ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of her sublime debut album, I wanted to spend some time inside Tuesday Night Music Club. The album’s title comes from the name for the ad hoc group of musicians including Crow that played on Tuesdays to work on the album. They share songwriting credits with her. Even if they started as a loose collective, when the debut album arrived, they were this vehicle for Crow. I think that they sound terrific through Tuesday Night Music Club. The band - David Baerwald, Bill Bottrell, Kevin Gilbert, David Ricketts, Dan Schwartz and Brian MacLeod – bring so much love, swing, passion and colour to Sherly Crow’s incredible 1993 debut album!
There was wrangle and fall-out when the album came out regarding songwriting credits. Her relationship with Kevin Gilbert strained. Crow claims to have written the songs, but both Gilbert and David Baerwald called out Crow regarding a lack of credit given to the band. Bill Bottrell was interviewed in 2008 and said it was all a bit vague. There is a lot of his sound and vision in the album. In truth, it is hard to say for sure who wrote what and which songs were entirely Crow’s. I think there is more harmony between the band members. Regardless, you can see the credits for each song and realise that it is a collaborative album. What strikes me most is Crow’s vocals. I had not really heard any Country-inspired artists by 1993. There is Blues and Pop in the mix, but there was something very different about Tuesday Night Music Club. Casting my mind to Las Vegas or Texas, it has this shifting scenery and evocative nature. I have always loved Crow’s voice, but discovering it new as a ten-year-old blew me away! Tuesday Night Music Club went on to sell some 7.6 million copies in the U.S. and U.K. during the 1990s. The album earned Crow three Grammy Awards in 1995: Record of the Year, Best New Artist, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. It is a remarkable achievement for such a modest and un-showy album. It is the catchiness, rich songwriting and incredible band connections that make it so successful and enduing. It still sounds so thrilling after thirty years! I am going to come to a review for the amazing Tuesday Night Music Club. Prior to getting there, I am going to bring in a couple of retrospective features.
I think that Tuesday Night Music Club is underrated. It has won some positive reviews, though there were quite a few mixed one. It deserves retrospection ahead of its thirtieth anniversary. This feature from earlier this year finds Paul Sexton casting his mind back to a time when a fresh and relatively unknown Sheryl Crow was making her first moves. The world was about to open their arms to a true star and phenomenal songwriter:
“On Tuesday nights in 1992, a group of musician friends took to gathering to share and jam creative ideas at Toad Hall, the living room-cum-studio of producer Bill Bottrell in Pasadena. One of the collective was a former music teacher who grew up in the three-stoplight, one-high-school town of Kennett, Missouri, and whose recent first attempt at a debut album was already hitting the buffers. Her name was Sheryl Crow, and those informal experiments became Tuesday Night Music Club.
Crow, the wider world would later learn, had sung backing vocals on Michael Jackson’s BAD tour and become a voice for hire with the likes of Rod Stewart and Stevie Wonder in her adopted California. The record she made as her supposed arrival as a solo talent, with esteemed British producer Hugh Padgham, was never released, a fact that didn’t become widely known until after her career went stratospheric.
As it did when her de facto debut slowly grew via word of mouth, a great gigging reputation and a succession of compelling hit singes into a multi-million-selling behemoth. Tuesday Night Music Club took a year to go gold and platinum in the US, but then shipped another six million copies in America alone in the next two and a half years. It won three Grammys, for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Record of the Year for its breakthrough single “All I Wanna Do,” and for Crow, 31 at the time of the album’s release, as Best New Artist.
In her sleeve notes for the album, Crow wrote of those nights in Pasadena: “By the end of the evening or the beginning of the morning, something special would have been composed and recorded, (or not), with each of us picking up the nearest instrument or open mic. Thus, the Tuesday Night Music Club was born, creating the impetus for my album.”
She went on to credit the key fellow members of the club, with special thanks to Bottrell and Kevin Gilbert, the latter also her boyfriend of the time. Both had songwriting credits along with David Baerwald, guitarist and erstwhile member of A&M duo David & David, bassists David Ricketts and Dan Schwartz, and drummer Brian MacLeod. A collective
indeed, especially with further lyrical contributions from Kevin Hunter and Wyn Cooper. Bottrell was producer, assisted by Schwartz, with Blair Lamb engineering.
Speaking to me for the same publication late that year, as she opened on European shows for Joe Cocker, she said that the album sessions took place with an attitude of “‘close the door, order some food, crack open the Jack Daniels and let’s go.’ I was really left to my own devices, weirdly enough. When I handed the record in, I felt, they’re either going to say ‘forget it, this is rubbish’ or send me back in and say ‘we need singles, this thing’s not focused,’ but they didn’t, they just took it and ran with it.”
Crow also confessed to the emotional single-mindedness that helped make the album such a memorable listening experience. “I’ve never had very many friends, I’m definitely introspective and my friends tend to be those moments when I escape to writing,” she mused. “For me, the road is a much more comfortable place than being home. I always suffer identity crises when I’m at home, because you walk into your living room and you’re supposed to feel normal, and it’s like ‘this is foreign to me.’ It’s always been that way”.
I will move on to a future from Albumism. They reviewed Tuesday Night Music Club on its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2018. I am not sure whether there is a special reissue of the album for the thirtieth. Let’s hope that something is planned, as I would be fascinated to hear any early takes with Crow and the band working through these amazing songs:
“The 1987 Wyn Cooper poem “Fun” begins, “’All I want is to have a little fun / Before I die,’ says the man next to me.” That meager request, the beginning of a poem exploring ennui, capitalism, and mortality, would become the signature line of one of the ‘90s biggest pop songs. This ironic turn would be Sheryl Crow’s first big hit. “All I Wanna Do” was nominated for a Grammy award and pushed Crow straight into the spotlight.
Cooper, not the most famous of contemporary poets, was rewarded with royalties and recognition of his work. But besides sharing existentialism buried in barroom banter, the two have more in common. In 1993, Cooper and Crow were two artists plugging away to little applause, rarely in the spotlight but steadfastly dedicated to their passions. They peddle the down-home, Middle America aesthetic, one with record-label backed easily listening, the other with small poems in independent journals.
The theme of collaboration (and the issue of creative ownership) runs deep in Crow’s debut album Tuesday Night Music Club. The title of the album comes from the shorthand used to describe the group of songwriters who came together in producer Bill Bottrell’s studio weekly. Once initiated into the group, Crow found a new direction for her debut album, originally too slick and commercial, now rooted in a country and blues sound missing from the Top 40 charts.
Tuesday Night Music Club was released in 1993, the same year similarly shaggy-haired rocker chicks like Melissa Etheridge and Liz Phair were climbing the music charts. But Crow’s deep commercial roots (she started her career writing jingles, and her first big music industry break was performing as a backup singer for Michael Jackson) helped her stand out from the pack, and ride the wave of “All I Wanna Do”’s immense popularity to a successful music career.
25 years later, the standout of the album is the ballad “Strong Enough.” The defiant refrain “nothing’s true and nothing’s right / so let me be alone tonight” introduces a song wrestling with self-doubt and self-love. The man in question seems to be an afterthought, the focus instead on whether or not Crow is deserving of love. It’s lilting, slow tempo and relatively simple guitar chords have spawned multiple covers, the track finding a niche in the empowered female arena.
With Tuesday Night Music Club, Sheryl Crow helped to usher in the new genre of coffee shop music. Adult contemporary with a rock edge, she became an alternative to the alternative scene. With her self-titled follow-up album, Crow introduced a little more grit to the formula, but returned to her pop roots in the subsequent years. Tuesday Night Music Club is an impressive debut album, regardless of the amount of studio musicians it took to craft, and sparked the career of a woman savvy enough to take a sparse country poem and create one of the biggest hits of the ‘90s”.
I shall finish with one of the more positive reviews for Tuesday Night Music Club. AllMusic noted how there was a mix of the vintage and contemporary in Sherly Crow’s debut album. It is fun and accessible, but it is also smart and layered. You get this album that is still being played and discussed almost three decades after it came out. I know that we will be admiring Tuesday Night Music Club for decades to come:
“Sheryl Crow earned her recording contract through hard work, gigging as a backing vocalist for everyone from Don Henley to Michael Jackson before entering the studio with Hugh Padgham to record her debut album. As it turned out, things didn't go entirely as planned. Instead of adhering to her rock & roll roots, the record was a slick set of contemporary pop, relying heavily on ballads. Upon hearing the completed album, Crow convinced A&M not to release the album, choosing to cut a new record with producer Bill Bottrell. Along with several Los Angeles-based songwriters and producers, including David Baerwald, David Ricketts, and Brian McLeod, Bottrell was part of a collective dubbed "the Tuesday Night Music Club." Every Tuesday, the group would get together, drink beer, jam, and write songs. Crow became part of the Club and, within a few months, she decided to craft her debut album around the songs and spirit of the collective. It was, for the most part, an inspired idea, since Tuesday Night Music Club has a loose, ramshackle charm that her unreleased debut lacked. At its best -- the opening quartet of "Run, Baby, Run," "Leaving Las Vegas," "Strong Enough," and "Can't Cry Anymore," plus the deceptively infectious "All I Wanna Do" -- are remarkable testaments to their collaboration, proving that roots rock can sound contemporary and have humor. That same spirit, however, also resulted in some half-finished songs, and the preponderance of those tracks make Tuesday Night Music Club better in memory than it is in practice. Still, even with the weaker moments, Crow manages to create an identity for herself -- a classic rocker at heart but with enough smarts to stay contemporary. And that's the lasting impression Tuesday Night Music Club leaves”.
A phenomenal debut album from one of the all-time great artists, Crow would build on this promise for Sherly Crow (1996) and The Globe Sessions (1998). The album’s opener, Run, Baby, Run, might look at a woman who runs from life’s problems. When it comes to Sherly Crow’s beautiful and instantly enchanting debut album, you will put it on, turn it up loud and…
STAY right where you are!