Sheryl Crow
Wildflower

THE REVIEW

Sheryl Suzanne Crow, aside from being one of my greatest icons, has always been a muse with multiform talent: always so different yet true to herself, complex, rich in nuances, and always immediately recognizable and identifiable. With such a personality, there is absolutely no need to make abrupt and sudden turns: her artistic journey has always been fluid and linear like a river: sometimes overflowing and impetuous, other times calm and serene, yet always unchanging in its flow towards the sea. However, in 2005 something changes, the course of the waters is diverted, new landscapes, familiar yet different, come to the listener's ears, and so "Wildflower" is born.

Surely the most meditated, reflective, and perhaps most feminine album of Sheryl's career: a sound rich in orchestration, warm, dense, creamy, and enveloping, reaching emotional heights that give goosebumps in the song that gives the album its title. In it, that voice I have fallen madly in love with turns into a whisper, a gentle lament that wanders with the grace of a butterfly over the arpeggios of a subtle folk guitar and the slow and melancholic swirls of a string-based background; a song that becomes the core of the entire album, where all the others somehow reflect and almost become variations on the theme: lyrics and melodies that are a bit like a light smile while a tear slides down the cheek, sung by a voice that warms the heart: songs that grow with momentum, with absolute naturalness like "I Don't Wanna Know", "Perfect Lie", "Good Is Good", "I Know Why" and the more complex and bluesy "Letter To God", or "Where Has All The Love Gone", ecstatic and liberating, and "Always On Your Side", pure magic in the form of a breathtaking piano-ballad, sung as only Sheryl can and knows how, with that "Butterflies are free to fly and so they fly away" that almost seems like a tribute to Elton John, which SC almost reinterprets in a strictly personal way in this wonderful song that challenges "Wildflower" for the highest moment of the album.

A record of rare and particular beauty, chromatically a natural green shaded in various tones, "Wildflower" is not, however, a perfect album, if only because more rhythmic tracks like "Live It Up" or "Lifetimes", enjoyable when taken individually, seem almost like foreign bodies in such a specific and defined context, but it remains a precious treasure chest in which Sheryl, the wild rose of Missouri deposits a piece of her soul, her uncertainties, her reflections, and her unshakable strength of spirit, thus reaching her peak as a songwriter.

"I know why the heart gets lonely every time you give your love away, and if you think you're only a shadow in the wind rolling round but when you go and let somebody in they might fade away" - "I Know Why"

"And everything I know just fades away, and where the wildflower grows it picks its space, and that's the way it is when nature plays its lovely hand, we'll understand everything" - "Wildflower"

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