Episode 270 - Sheryl Crow

Hello and welcome to the Soda Jacker on Songwriting Podcast. This is Simon, joined as always by Brian, and with us for episode 270 is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and recent inductee into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame. To date she sold more than fifty million albums worldwide.

Across a career spanning well over three decades, she's recorded or performed with the likes of Prince, The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Stevie Nicks, Johnny Cash, Emilou Harris, Luciano Pavarotti, Chris Christofferson, and many more Earlier this year, she released her twelfth studio album, Evolution, co-produced with Mike Elizondo. We are thrilled to welcome the fantastic Cheryl Crow to the podcast.

We were lucky enough to meet Cheryl a few weeks ago in London while she was in the UK doing some live dates, and she more than met our expectations, didn't she, Bright?

She sure did. She was super cool and down to earth and just a pleasure to chat with.

Cheryl was born in Kennett, Missouri in nineteen sixty two. Her dad Wendell, a lawyer by profession, was also a trumpet player, while Mum Bernice sang and taught piano and both performed in an amateur swing band on the weekends. Their daughter proved similarly musical from a very early age, picking out tunes by ear on the piano and taking lessons from the age of five.

Her parents were also keen record collectors and Cheryl would spend hours amazing herself in the classic songwriting of albums like George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, James Taylor's Mudslide Slim and The Blue Horizon, Elton John's Goodbye Yellowbrick Road, and The Stones Exile on Main Street.

Our guest penned their first song at thirteen for a songwriting competition, the brief for which was to come up with a state themed song for Missouri. After high school she went on to major in music at the University of Missouri, graduating with a degree in voice and piano. For the next couple of years she taught music at an elementary school, supplementing her income by playing in covers bands and lending her voice to advertising jingles.

With the funds earned from an appearance on a McDonald's commercial, Cheryl moved to LA in 1986, where she hawked around her demo tape and worked as a session singer. Then, in 1988, she got the gig as backing vocalist on Michael Jackson's Bad Tour and spent the next two years travelling the world as part of the biggest show on earth, although she continued to write songs throughout that period.

In nineteen ninety one Cheryl signed to AM and with Hugh Padgam on board as producer made what was intended to be her debut album, but she was dissatisfied with the overly polished sound of the finished product and the record was shelved. Somewhat disillusioned, Cheryl took a job playing keys for the band Toy Matine, whose front man Kevin Gilbert introduced her to some talented musician friends, including David Beerwald, Bill Bottrell and Brian McLeod.

It also gave rise to her breakthrough recording. However, 1993's Tuesday Night Music Club was something of a slow burner. In fact, it wasn't until almost a year after its release, when the Win Cooper-inspired single All I Wanna Do became an international smash that the album started to shift to serious units. It eventually picked up three Grammys at the nineteen ninety five awards and has since gone seven times platinum.

Cheryl parted ways with close collaborator Bill Buttrell during the early stages of what became her self-produced follow-up, at which point she called upon the services of another talented pal, Jeff Trott, who had become an important creative partner.

It was also during this fruitful time that Cheryl co-wrote and recorded the theme song for the 1997 Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, with the following year's Globe Sessions becoming her third platinum-selling top 10 LP. Other solid studio efforts include 2002's Come On Come On, 2006's Wildflower, 2010's Soulful Hundred Miles from Memphis, and 2013's Country Flavoured Feels Like Home.

Our guest was also the subject of the 2022 documentary Cheryl, directed by Amy Scott and currently streaming on Amazon. It is well worth checking out.

If you're a first-time listener to our podcast, we hope you'll stick around, follow us on your preferred pod platform, and dive into our huge archive of songwriter interviews. If you'd like to help us keep the show independent and ad-free, give whatever you can spare towards its upkeep at Sodajeker.com/slash donate.

Before we hear from Cheryl, our thanks to Evie for her help set up.

Okay, here we are in look.

See ya. Thank you. Nice to meet you guys.

We've been uh fans of your songwriting forever, really I'd say.

Yeah.

You always seem to have that gift for just finding those undeniable choruses, you know.

I love a big chorus. I love a big chorus.

Yeah. We found that to be the case with uh alarm clocks.

Oh my goodness.

I mean that's just um it's such a like a punchy, tuneful piece of pop that, isn't it?

Well, you know, it's funny, um, on this record I worked with a guy named Mike Elizondo who I just Love and adore. I've known him for 20 years. But I walked in one morning and I said, I want to write a song about how much I hate my alarm clock. Because my kids say it every day. Oh my God, I hate my alarm clock. And he was like, let's do it.

So what did you each contribute to that one then?

Um, Mike is kind of like the um he programs and he's a fantastic musician. So he was working on a groove and some chord structure and then Emily and I just sat down and started banging through. Okay, this is I said, this is the way I see it. I wanna write a song about how much like every dream can be so beautiful and elaborate, but that your alarm clock, as soon as it goes off, that dream is over.

So where did that chorus melody come in? Because it sort of works in unison with the riff. Did the riff come first?

Uh no, the rift came second. That's where the riff came from. Oh okay. Yeah.

I see. So that sort of just tracks the vocal melody then. Ah right, okay. Yeah, I like the concept of the alarm clock as the sort of interrupter of happiness.

Yes.

a really good idea So it was always alarm clocks, it wasn't any other object.

No, that was I just said I've gotta write a song about my alarm clock. It just it jars me into my day, you know. It is funny though,'cause I told my kids. My kids are seventeen and fourteen. And they've not seen the documentary. They don't really know who I was before they came along. And I can remember saying to them, six o'clock in the morning used to be like when I would roll in sometimes. They're like, What? What were you doing until six o'clock in the morning?

You don't skimp on the verses either. I love the image in um the opening line actually where you say the guy who looks like Charlemagne handing me a skinny margarita with a salt rim. Great description.

Yeah, you know, I love writing. When I grew up my dad would read to us. We weren't allowed to read at the table, but my dad would read to us. I mean, even when we were in like Junior high, even when we hated reading, he would be reading something that he loved, whether it was like Putnam Had Wilson by Mark Twain or whether it was like a a suspense novel, and he would get to a part where he just thought, Oh, this is the best writing in the world.

Yeah. But that's very economical, that line, isn't it?'Cause you know, mentioning Charlemagne, like you can instantly sort of picture that guy. Well, even if you don't picture the guy it's

He sets the tone. He definitely sets the tone. Yeah.

It's a very musical word actually, chalomet.

Because

As if he doesn't have an Ofcom forum.

I think our next band should be called Chalamet.

That's not-

So shall of our own.

Yeah.

So do you find that sort of stuff tends to come to you in a flash then, or is there kind of a process of drafting a line like that?

Um, it depends. I mean, you know, I will say as I've gotten older, writing is much more fun for me. In the early days I felt like so much rode on what I was writing. You get to a certain point and this is I mean, for better or worse, I've kind of aged out of Being competitive, you know what I mean? I've aged out of competing with what's on radio and trying to be relevant. Now I just, you know, I write because I have something on my chest, in particular this record. Oh my goodness.

So how did you get from the porch to collaborating with Mike Elizondo in terms of how those songs evolved?

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean part of it started with digging in the dirt. I kept coming back to that song. One day I was out jogging and it came up on my playlist and I called him. I hadn't seen him in a couple of years. And I said, This is so odd, but I wanna do this song and I want you to produce it if you have time And he was like, Oh Would love to do that song.

That's him playing bass on love life, isn't he? Yeah, I love the groove on that.

What's crazy about that is that was from twenty years ago. Really? That track was. And I kept telling all these years of like, we've got to do something with that. But I'd had it so long I couldn't figure out what it was about. So that's literally the track. And I sang over it.

Yeah. It's great. You just lose yourself in that groove.

Oh, I loved it. I loved it so much. I got so bogged down with how much I loved the track that I could not figure out. How to fit words into the melody because originally it was just like no You know, very Stevie Wonder. Yeah. And then everything I was saying over it would sound really stupid. Um, but we cracked the code.

And you've got Wendy Melvoin on guitar on that as well. Yes. The Prince connection there. Yeah.

From all the way back when you're going to be able to do

Yeah, we're total prince nerds, so that's exciting.

Yeah, I miss knowing he's in the

Quite prince esque moments on that track actually I think.

Yeah. It was uh Mike programmed it and played the bass and Wendy played the guitar and then this Really crazy guy named Keefus in LA who's been on I think quite a few things. Just an engineer of kooky sounds and great playing. I'm playing some Morlitzer and then he did everything else. It's just so much fun.

Yeah, you've got some good guests on it, haven't you? Tom Morello's on Evolution as well.

It's also I've known Tom for years. We're like, who should we get to play on it? And he was being inducted at the same time I was being inducted in the Hall of Fame. And I mean, I can't think of anybody that could have brought that outer space thing to it. It was so

Like an evolved guitar player.

He's never gonna play anything that you could ever imagine. And uh oh when we listened to it back the first time, I literally started crying. I was just like, Oh like my brain can't understand it, which is perfect because the song is about AI. It's about the future and about where are we going, you know.

Yeah. I guess you must think quite carefully like about who you're asked to participate on a given song, like their sensibility has to match the track.

Yeah, I mean, especially because this record is so cinematic. You couldn't just have anybody come in and play some blues licks, you know? And Mike, man, when he suggested, I thought, gosh, I wouldn't have even thought about Tom and it was just the perfect choice.

So is it typical for you then to have a concept in mind before you start a song? Like when you're on the back porch, would you be thinking about the rise of AI, for example?

No, I had been reading about AI. This George Carlin thing had happened. I don't know if you guys read about it, but somebody took a George Carlin likeness. I mean perfect likeness. And they wrote a bunch of jokes and they put out an hour special and the family was just you know, and then started reading about the John Lennon thing, which is a little bit different. I mean, we've had programs in Pro Tools for years that could kind of separate things out in demos.

So you got the whole thing in one pass? Was that with the words and the music?

Yeah, I played it and started just singing and then filled in the blanks. I've only had a few of those songs like Weather Channel was that, My Favorite Mistake was that, Redemption Day was that. Just songs that were kind of atypical of how I right. Don't walk away was like that. Ones that were really inspired from a Like a deep connection to something.

Do you think there's anything you can do to trigger that kind of

I wish what usually happens or in the past what always happened was when I was really trying to wrestle something to the ground. you know, I'm gonna finish this pop thing, I'm gonna hopefully it's gonna be commercial. And as soon as I would step away from it, something else great would c you know, it's like the ego wrestling with spirit.

Mae'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r

Yes, but they're not always the ones that pay the house bill. Yeah. You know what I mean?

They might be the more personal, more precious kind of songs.

Absolutely. Right. Yeah.

Uh. Those feelings you described though in Evolution, I love that line, um, we are passengers and there's no one at the wheel.'Cause it works as a metaphor but it's literally true as well. We have like driverless cars, which to me is

Yeah.

In total recall or something.

Yes. It is shocking. You know, I played in the Halifax lesson and I told the audience I said, You have no idea. How nice it is to be standing in front of you and not listening to the mishigosh that is happening in my country. I don't even recognize it, you know. It's so jarring, so alarming, you know. So songs like that for me are easy to write. You know, the whole album is not a downer. It's more just like A lot of questions, you know.

You do seem to touch on that thing with broken record as well, though.

Oh my god.

Is that you kind of returning to this idea?

Um, that came about because we had a shooting right down the street from us. It was a school shooting and I dropped my kids off the next day at our own school. And there were armed guards at our school and it's the new frontier. It is the way it is now. And I live in a town where country music was born and it thrives and it supports the community and it has a very strong conservative presence and the state of Tennessee is very conservative.

It's great that these things find their way into your songs though, I think. I mean that's really important. Have you always been driven to make them part of your work?

You know, it was really weird because that song is thirty years almost to the day of having written a song about Walmart and getting banned at Walmart.

Was that love as a good thing?

That was love is a good Wow. Deep dive. Not many people know that song, but it was a weird moment when it happened the first time because the repercussions of it were like getting banned and people couldn't go by the record and Now I can do it and it's some flip on the radar. And mainly because there's just so much stuff out there. And because I'm my age, it's like, yeah, uh, she's just gonna write whatever she wants.

You've always had that sort of brutal honesty in you right now, haven't you? You you mentioned um Weather Channel before, you know, that kind of song, All Love is a good thing, you know. When you think back, is it those kinds of songs that resonate as the most meaningful for you?

Yeah, I mean in a weird way they're they're lifelines for me. I can only look back on my life now after having been through lots of therapy and doing a lot of work on myself. I came in with just a massive load of melancholy, which does make me believe that perhaps

Yeah, well there's loads in your catalogue I suppose, isn't there? What I can do for you was another one, wasn't it, that was uh

Yeah.

Powerful confession about the way the business works.

Yeah, that and just having been through a really long bout of sexual harassment and then being able to write about it in the Nana song. And what was funny about that was that it was right at the moment when Clarence Thomas was being heard before our Senate about sexual harassment. Of course now he's still a Supreme Court justice. And we're now, of course, in the Me Too moment or past it, but still, I guess, benefiting somewhat.

So does your schooling have any part of playing your songwriting?'Cause obviously you were um classically trained and y you taught music for a while as well. Does that have an impact on how you write at all?

Well it's funny because you go through all your training and you're studying and you learn all the rules of songwriting, like no parallel thirds, no parallel fifths, all these rules that pop music continually defies. Like the Beatles made a history of parallel thirds and parallel fifths, you know, and major minor and just understanding it, I think, probably in some ways helped me to pick up other instruments. more than anything else. I mean I did study classical training but I was

I don't know. I loved knowing. Like I still love understanding it, but do I use it? It's hard to know.

Right.

You know, in Nashville everything's the number system. And I had to learn that. And it just was like, what? What? A two and do a four, seven or you know what? And not that many people know chords. But yeah, I like having it in my back pocket.

Yeah, we do have guests sometimes who say that their parents were musical and I always wonder to what extent that might impact on them, you know,'cause some people say, Oh, my parents were in an orchestra or something like that and it's like, Well, you were around music all the time but There are also people who come on who had parents who were train drivers or whatever and they still gravitated towards music in that way. So Yeah.

Yeah. I'm always stunned when I meet people that are just insanely gifted and their parents aren't musical at all. You know? Another case for past lives, perhaps. Um yeah, I don't know. It's funny though. I I think you can have it drilled into your

And you wrote your first song at like thirteen. That seems to be quite common for songwriters. As soon as they hit kind of adolescence, that's when they start.

Yeah, I know. And it's also you start becoming a little more self aware when you hit your teen years and you're like, Hmm, who am I? Oh, I think I'm Carol King. Or I think I might be Joni Mitchell, you know. Or I might be Linda Ronstadt.

Were people like that formative for you? Were you listening to those people and

My gosh. They were totally you know, I do miss the fact that young people don't have that experience of waiting for the record to come out and getting all their friends over and listening to it from top to bottom, turning the record over, you know.

I guess in later years the whole idea of the Tuesday Night Music Club was a songwriting collective.

It started out as that. Yes. That's how we got started. And then about four songs in, Bill was like, okay, now it's time to get serious. But some good songs were written in those first few sessions.

That must have been really helpful though, sort of being around that group of people who have the same passions and and intuitions about songs.

Yeah, it was very heady. You know, it was very heady to be around people that were very worldly. I literally was a school teacher from a tiny town, moved to LA, went on the Jackson tour, came home, went back to being a waitress.

With them being sort of a very literate group, that Wynn Cooper poem that you adapted into All I Wanna Do, would you have brought that in or would that have just been part of the kind of

Yeah, I mean yes. We had gone out and had a bunch of margaritas, we were walking through Pasadena, stopped at this bookstore as, you know, mom and pop bookstores that used to exist. And I think maybe Bill happened onto this little thin book of poetry, maybe 40 poems, paperback. And brought in the studio from our night out. Came back. We started that track about eleven thirty at night. Jammed up this

And the way you sort of delivered that vocal, did they take much consideration how you sort of fit a poem?'Cause they're two very different things, a poem and a lyric, or they can be. Yeah. Was there much conscious thought about how you were gonna work it into something?

There was no thought. I mean, it was like a Gil Scott Heron moment where, you know, sort of he to me symbolizes like the beginnings of rap, you know. The words, but all in the delivery too, that makes you travel through that story with him and This was, you know, the product of a bunch of tequila and some cigarettes and also the spirit.

I'm amazed to hear you say that, that you just sort of had an intuitive approach to translating that into music'cause the way you make it musical is really I mean I think it's like a lesson in adaptation, you know,'cause you miss certain things out of the poem, things that don't sing and it's very specific, I think, what you did with it. So I'm amazed to hear you say that you just kinda did that.

Such a weird thing. It's so not what I do. And I can't drink like that anymore. You know, and there is a spirit to those first couple of records where, you know, when you're feeling very imposterish, a few drinks like helps you get to the other side, right? helps you sort of like get out of your head and leaving Las Vegas was the product of that as well. You know, you kind of have to go back and learn it, learn the song because it's delivering something from almost an alter ego.

Wow.

You had to go to like a detox after the after the album was made.

And y you've always had these very satisfying courses. Obviously that's a great example or there's uh every day is a winding road or if it makes you happy. Is there sort of a technical part of your training to come back to that, you know, that enables you to make those choruses land so perfectly, like find the sweet spot?

I don't know. I mean, it's hard to analyze the thing that comes naturally to you. I don't know how to break it down except to say that I grew up loving songs that had big choruses, you know. I was the product of parents who played in an amateur big band and all the crooners, you know, from Frank Sinatra to Judy Garland to Edda James to

So your day-to-day writing then?'Cause I associate you more with the guitar than any other instrument, but I know obviously you play other instruments. So would we find you sort of on the back porch with a guitar? Is that where most of these things start?

This record, yes. You know, early days I wrote on piano because that's where my comfort zone was. One of the beautiful things about working with Bill was that he would never let you play the instrument you were comfortable on because then you would be predictable. And that was good for me. I do find I write a lot on bass. Because it keeps me from doing the progressions that I will lazily get to.

We've heard that a couple of times haven't about people writing on bass, yeah, for the same reason.

And also I can create a rhythm on it as well that you can't really get on a piano. I tend to write more ballad stuff if I'm sitting at the piano. But I still write on it. I mean there's stuff on this record that I wrote on the piano and you know it is what it is.

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Yes, and that was just I asked my engineer Alberto, I said, Will you come in for an hour today and let me just play this song? And he put up a click. And I played it and then I sent it to Mike and he said, Okay, give me a day or two and I went back and oh my gosh, made me cry. Oh wow. Same with evolution, same with the song Where, which is a demo. Same with Broken Record.

Right?

Which is really funny. I had played that song for a couple of people. I'd played it for Jeff Trot even. Nobody liked it. I mean, everybody's like, Uh, yeah, no. And I played it for Mike and he's like, Oh my god, I'd love to do this. And you can hear he brings that, you know, he's like the beginnings for Dr. Dre and Eminem. And so when it starts off, you go, Oh yeah, this is like Beasties, you know, killer.

Um we watched your documentary recently as well and you mentioned

You really have done your own work, boys.

Leave no stone unturned. Um and you mentioned that about being like a bit of a gear head. Is there any sort of equipment or gear that you might incorporate into the songwriting process that you're sort of superstitious about using?

Yeah, I mean there's certain instruments I definitely I mean, I have this one guitar I called the Moneymaker and really it's an acoustic guitar. I bought it the first year I started making money. I think within maybe six months of owning it, I dropped it and broke the neck. But it's still amazing. We had a a very good luthier'cause it's still hanging in there. And I just feel like of all the amazing instruments

So you'll kind of beatbox but on a voice memo or something like that.

I'll do it on a voice memo. And then I'll load it into my computer and then I'll record myself playing and singing over on my voicemail. I mean, it's so like I could just put up garage band. Um actually when I was on the Jackson tour, we all took out these Like anvil cases with our own personal little studios with four tracks in them. Rice. And you know, you pulled out a drawer and you had your um latest keyboards and even had a couple of like little compressors and

Yeah. Are you able to say, you know, if I said a song like Wildflower, for example, are you able to say Oh Moneymaker?

That one was on a Martin and I had just bought the guitar. I never treated myself to an expensive

And I was in a relationship that was very emotionally taxing. And so I rented out this little tiny shithole. of a studio in Austin and I called Jeff and said, Will you come down? I've bought this guitar. I'm gonna write some songs and just barf out what's going on. And that was the first thing. I had written it the night before you got there, four thirty in the morning in my bedroom, on that guitar, and went in the next day and we did a little demo of it, which is what is on the record.

You're very spontaneous, aren't you? Everything that you do seems to be the record.

Well well I'll tell you what, this is interesting, the second record, the Sheryl Crow record. I went in with Bill. We decided we'd do it in New Orleans. We rented out Kingsway. Amazing studio. We got there and nothing really worked. Bill got very frustrated and I think he was going through his own his own stuff. He left after a day or two before we really even got into recording.

Ha ha ha.

And early on, I know you had quite a few of your songs recorded by other artists and then you've had like Johnny Cash do Redemption Day and stuff like that. Is that an aspect of your songwriting that's important to you that your songs are kind of there to be interpreted by other people like that?

I wanted to be able to make a living writing songs. I wasn't sure if I saw myself as a great artist. And, you know, this has been a curse. When I started out, I didn't want to be famous. I wanted to be great. I mean, I wanted to be on the caliber of people that had changed my life, you know, and that's an immense amount of pressure. But the thing with that is that it makes you always fall short, makes you feel like you're never good enough.

When we were doing our research we came across Tomorrow Never Dies as well for your Bond song. Um and I was wondering, was that something that you sort of wrote to order to like a kind of a brief or did you have the makings of that song before the film project?

No, not at all. In fact, they don't let you see anything and they don't let you read anything. They just give you the title. Which can be very daunting because it's like, what is the song about? Tomorrow never dies. Let me think. So you had to write the movie in your head, but you kind of already know, you know, the legacy of this thing and the tradition of it. So it kinda gave me permission to be dramatic and to write, you know, kind of the stuff that I used to listen to when I was a kid.

Is that an instance maybe where you're drawing on a little bit of your sort of...

Schooling.

Like does it you know, it's got a very specific harmonic identity a Bon song, hasn't it, in certain intervals and

Yes. And you know, when you're first trying to figure out who you are as an artist, you have to abandon well, for me, I had to abandon what I knew. I had to abandon the fancy chords because you can't go out and rock. And have the fancy chords, do you know what I mean?

We heard that uh George Harrison called those naughty cords.

Yes, they're naughty chords. And I would write with Jeff and I'd go like, No, no, no, you've got to take the seventh out of that. You know, you there we can't have an eleventh in that you know. There can't be anything augmented if you know what I'm saying.

Yeah. Well you really nailed it with that song. I mean it's got that Bond flavour and it's got that sort of typical chorus.

Oh, so much fun. And the thing that was really disappointing for me is that they released it over here as a single, but because Strong Enough to Be My Man was hitting in America, they didn't release it as a single because they didn't want it to compete. Whereas I would love to have that like be a big song in the catalogue that you just play every night, you know.

No, it's a good one. Thank you. I suppose that's quite a different process then to something like evolution. I think you said evolution was more like a gift you were giving yourself.

Yeah. A lot of thinking and a lot of, ooh, what if we go here? And you know, what I call the McCoy Tiner or the Keith Jarrett where you see your hands going like this, you know. You get to like stretch out and do some jazz.

So would you say the process has gotten easier for you over time in general?

Yes, but it didn't come without a lot of anguish. I mean, there was a point when I was turning forty that everybody on the radio, like Britney Spears and uh Christine Aguilar, they were all like seventeen, literally.

Well we still think you're the greatest.

Oh my god.

Thank you.

Thank you. We played last night in Halifax and I told the audience it's been about a year ago I got to be on the bill with Lionel Ritchie and Billy Joel, who both are very good. They have a lot of familiar songs. And um Lionel, he pulled both of us into his dressing room. He was literally like an excited kid.

Well thanks very much for this conversation. It's been great.

Thank you for having me. I have to say you guys do such good podcasts, such good work. For me, it's so inspiring and it makes me want to keep doing it. Wow. I'm a huge lover of podcasts, but It's really fun. I got to meet Theo recently and um Theo Castman and you know, young people like that, you just go, Oh my god, it gives me such hope, you know. So

Oh you had the Theo one.

Yes, yes. I mean I've heard a lot of'em, but it's fun to hear a new um yeah, I mean, I did a little prep before I came and um And now I'm like digging deep on the airplane on the way over here. I was like, Oh my God, this is so good. It's fun. It's very fun. So thank you guys. Thanks for having me.

That was Cheryl Crow talking to us in London about her latest record, Evolution, and her songwriting career.

Needless to say, it was wonderful meeting her, wasn't it, Bry?

It was, and such a thrill to find out she's listened to some episodes of the show.

Crazy, isn't it, how these things pan out.

It really is. And after the interview before we could ask her for a photo, she asked us for one. So now Cheryl's walking around with a picture of us on her phone, which is uh quite insane.

Yeah.

She had a lot of interesting things to say about her work, didn't she? In particular I thought about how her upbringing and her training have fed into her approach to making music.

Yeah, and that's led to a situation now where she seems very comfortable with who she is, you know, what she's achieved and and what she can do. Even if she does have some concerns about the direction we're going in with technology, you know, especially AI.

Yeah, yeah, she had some interesting comments about that, didn't she? But the process for the new album seems to have been quite a nice mix of the organic and the technical, I thought.

Yeah. You know, beginning with the acoustic guitar, the moneymaker, as she calls it, on the back porch and then um handing over the material to Mike Elizondo to Scorsese the songs into these more cinematic productions. The verb to Scorsese. Yeah.

Ha ha.

She works quickly, doesn't she? It looks like she uses the demo as the basis for the actual record a lot of the time.

Yeah, I love that spontaneous approach.

It obviously worked really well, didn't it?'Cause she sounds as good as ever, doesn't she? On songs like Alarm Clock and You Can't Change the Weather

Yeah, I mean I can't really notice any discernible difference in a voice from the Tuesday Night Music Club era to now.

She's really looked after her voice, I suppose, you know, and that probably comes from her training as well.

Yeah, I guess if you learn the the right way to sing it it saves you well in later life, you know, you don't lose as much of your range as maybe the singers who kinda fly by the seat of their pants, you know.

And how cool was it to get to ask about those classic hits in the catalogue like All I Wanna Do?

I still can't believe that she adapted that poem on the fly so easily.

I wondered if there was a bit of a Bob Dylan influence there on the delivery of that one.'Cause he's got that way, hasn't he, of sort of negotiating a a fast onslaught of words and making it sound kinda effortless.

Yeah, yeah, I could hear him doing a version of that song actually, you know. Yeah, yeah.

I guess sometimes it takes a lot of finesse to sound that loose and sometimes you just hit a flow.

Exactly, yeah. So thanks to Cheryl for an invigorating discussion, lots to think about in there, and thanks again to Evie for setting that.

up. Evolution is out now and we'll be back again soon to chat to more of your favourite songwriters.