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Sheryl Crow's detours to joy

By Sean Daly, Times Pop Music Critic
In print: Wednesday, April 30, 2008

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ADVERTISEMENT [JOSEPH GARNETT JR. | Times] Grammy Award winner Sheryl Crow, touring in support of her new album, Detours, plays her old favorites and new songs for the crowd at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater on Tuesday night.

CLEARWATER — Sheryl Crow sure has packed a lot of living into 46 years. She has battled breast cancer and Karl Rove. She famously dated Lance Armstrong — and then famously didn't. She adopted a son. She bashed a president.

And that's just in the last few years.

The Missouri singer-songwriter can't escape the drama, so she processes it the only way she can, building best-selling albums like diary entries you can dance to. She's an intimate, in-your-face performer best seen in an intimate, in-your-face hall.

And we had just the place for her.

Touring behind new album Detours, a hit-or-miss purging of all things political and painful, Crow dished all her personal dirt to 2,039 fans at Ruth Eckerd Hall Tuesday.

Opening with the quiet, acoustic angst of the new God Bless This Mess, with its damning of "a war based on lies," the diminutive firebrand soon shifted sonic gears and kicked into an endlessly electric rock show, alternating between new stuff and stuck-in-your-head hits dating back to her 1993 debut, Tuesday Night Music Club.

Backed by a tight eight-piece band well-versed in her preferred dive-bar boogie, Crow's bewhiskeyed wail, a finely aged instrument, got stronger and stronger with each song: the funky oomph of A Change, the restless beauty of Leaving Las Vegas, the midtempo strut of Can't Cry Anymore, the tricky breakup smash My Favorite Mistake.

If the bass was too loud, well, she just got louder — and better.

Crow was loose, smiling, adorable, the diminutive star with the cascading dirty-blonde hair exuding charm to spare. For a cover of Cat Stevens' The First Cut Is the Deepest, she even traded verses with a young girl in the front row.

For tabloid-readers looking for Armstrong references, they were there in sneaky, cheeky ways. On the new album, the song Diamond Ring is sad, somber. Onstage, however, she tweaked the tune with winky torch-song flair: "I blew up our love nest / By making one little request / Diamonnnd ringgg!"

"I've been engaged three times," Crow said with a laugh afterward, "and I'm pretty proud of it."

She then launched into Now That You're Gone. Hint: She's over him.

Even the weaker songs on Detours were made likable in a live setting. The hamhanded futuristic clunker Gasoline was saved by a menacing midsong injection of the Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter. And the cheeseball singalong Out of Our Heads ("If we could only get out of our heads, out of our heads, and into our hearts!") turned into a silly but fun drum-circle chant, the seated crowd forgoing protocol and stomping to its feet.

For the absolutely sublime If It Makes You Happy, her signature song, Crow reared back and hollered that titular chorus, letting it all go, the catchiest catharsis in her songbook. From the sound of it, Sheryl Crow has a lot of living left to do, too.

Sean Daly can be reached at sdaly@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8467. His Pop Life blog is at blogs.tampabay.com/popmusic.