Sheryl Crow by Sheryl Crow

Sheryl Crow's self-titled album is her second album, and was released in 1996. It reached #6 on the Billboard 200 chart and #5 on the UK Album Chart. In 2008 it went triple platinum in the States. It has sold 880,000 copies in the UK. It won two 1996 Grammys: Sheryl Crow won Best Rock Album, and "If It Makes You Happy" won Best Female Rock Performance. In the United States that single, along with "A Change (Would Do You Good)," had received tremendous cross-genre airplay in several radio formats, illustrating the comparative eclecticism that the album introduced without denting its artist's mainstream appeal. The thematic and stylistic differences between this release and Crow's 1993 debut, Tuesday Night Music Club, were and are quite noteworthy to the listener and the commercial music world. It has a wider range of instrumentation and soundscape, such as the use of percussion loops, banjo and steel guitar (among other, less common instruments), and sometimes slower and more complex rhythms. The lyrics display a much broader variety of emotion and subject matter than Crow had shown previously. For example, the song "Love Is a Good Thing" contains the lyrics "Watch out sister, watch out brother/watch our children while they kill each other/with a gun they bought at a Wal-Mart discount store" (in criticism of Wal-Mart's gun sales policy). Wal-Mart banned the album at its stores, which would have been unthinkable for Music Club, or for that matter any of Crow's ensuing albums. Much of "Sheryl Crow's" content stands out as a distinct departure from Crow's overall style of extremely pop-friendly, accessible and upbeat mainstream rock. Two of this album's songs, "Redemption Day" and the single "Every Day is a Winding Road," were prominently featured in the very successful 2000 U. S. film Erin Brokovich and are on its soundtrack. ℗ 1996 UMG Recordings, Inc.