Joseph Hudak
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Shery Crow talks freedom, calling Bob Dylan, and new album ‘Pick You Up’ on Nashville Now podcast. Jen Rosenstein* From touring with Bob Dylan and spending quality time with Dolly Parton to being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, even Sheryl Crow can’t believe the arc of her career. In a new episode of Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, Crow talks about how her life experiences, and her mix of apprehension and hope for the future, informed her new album Pick You Up, which includes a collab with Jesse Welles titled “Freedom Bus.”
So, how does Crow define “freedom”?
“Freedom means the ability to let everyone be authentic and celebrate that, and want what’s best for them,” she tells Rolling Stone. “I look at Dolly and think, what a beautiful example of somebody who just wanted to make people’s lives better.”
Crow acknowledges that freedom and other words have been co-opted for divisive purposes. They’re trigger words, she says, and they’ve even infiltrated country music.
“There are words we use against each other to create sides: ‘fake,’ and ‘woke,’ and ‘patriot.’ The word ‘patriotic’ and ‘patriot’ really is offensive to me. Because I feel very patriotic about my country, but I’m not a conservative. I’m a middle-of-the-road pragmatist. But [patriotic] is used for one category of people and it’s used against others and I take offense with that.
“I am hoping that we will evenutally become politically savvy enough — all of us — to know that when a word is used against somebody, it needs to be investigated as to whether that word is a dual meaning word.”
