Sheryl Crow
Tuesday Night Music Club

THE REVIEW

It was 1993: the musical world was captivated by the angry wave from Seattle and its surroundings, with Nirvana's "In Utero" and Pearl Jam's "Versus" dominating the American charts, carving a deep groove between their visceral and tormented rock, the ever-present hip hop and country from those parts, and a commercial pop still best represented by the voices of Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and the soul pop of Janet Jackson.

From Missouri came a beautiful girl who grew up listening to Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan. She endured a hard apprenticeship, first as a backup singer on Michael Jackson's "Bad Tour" and then as an aspiring singer-songwriter searching for a record deal that never seemed to arrive, facing setbacks and attempts to transform her into a pop star, potentially exploiting her appealing image.

The initial demos of this "Tuesday Night Music Club" sounded very polished, so singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow discarded it all and entrusted Bill Bottrell, a producer who finally led her to a clean and very "live" rock sound.

Bob Dylan invited her to his birthday concert-celebration in 1993 at Madison Square Garden, and he said of her: "I've been singing around for thirty years, enough to recognize someone else's talent. You truly possess something."

Everyone can be wrong, even Nobel Prize winner Mr. Zimmerman, but in this case, the bet paid off: in this debut, there's the delicate and now famous ballad "Run Baby Run", the intimate “Strong Enough” where, reversing the roles, Sheryl asks a man “Are you strong enough to be my man?”

Everything flows pleasantly and catchy, from the funky “Solidify” to the on-the-road atmosphere of “Leaving Las Vegas,” accompanied by a video clip that also pays tribute to Elvis Presley, the refined and jazzy “We do what I can” all the way to the delicate “I shall believe,” a closing track loved by her most ardent fans.

However, this album would have gone unnoticed without “All I Wanna Do,” the powerful single that allowed Sheryl to enter all the world charts and which launched the entire project with a delay, catapulting her into high rotation on radio and music TV, leading her to sell four and a half million copies and winning, for this song, two Grammy Awards.

In 2009, a “Deluxe edition” of the album was released with a Bonus DVD containing the singles' music videos, a short documentary of the Tuesday Night Music Club Tour '93-'95, and most notably, a second audio CD with unreleased material and decent level B-Sides that capture the artist's graceful state.

It is Sheryl's voice in all its nuances that emerges in these tracks, from “storyteller” in the sarcastic “Killer Life”, surprising in the unreleased sensual whispers of “Essential Trip of Hereness”, and gritty in the Led Zeppelin cover “D'yer Mak'er” which she had already performed in her MTV Unplugged show.

In conclusion, a well-crafted album, an excellent debut, to be discovered beyond the famous singles.