Social Molecules With Sheryl Crow

In 1988 then-unknown Sheryl Crow, after striking out getting signed on her own with the big record labels, auditioned for and was hired to be a backup singer on Michael Jackson's "Bad" concert tour. She described in 2013 the tour to the New York Times' Jon Perales in a TimesTalk as "an amazing training ground." She said she witnessed there the coinciding traits of high-octane performances, like those given by Jackson on the tour, and "fragility." She calls the quality that performers who clear that threshold, the quality those performers embody, she described as their "divinity." She was careful to say pain and divinity are not the same thing.

"You can go on youtube you can see the greatest artists in the world Eric Clapton playing um George Harrison you can go back and see old films of Ella and um Billy Holiday, and you can see these people in their pain in their divinity um not that the two are the same. It's that fragile spirit and it's that thing that is not definable to me that is the divinity that exists in all of us.

The thing that makes us run sporting events and break records ... that thing that makes us write some piece of poetry that we cannot figure out where it came from because it does not even sound like our vernacular.

That moment of being in your divinity the closest you'll ever be to spirit. And I watched that with Michael I watched that thing ... I watched that thing ... what Santana says change the molecules in a stadium of 75,000 people I see it in Mick Jagger even though he's much more, he's much more showy flamboyant there's not those tender moments as much but there is something that does reach you in moments.

But with Michael I saw it a lot you know I saw him doing the things nobody had ever done before. I saw him doing moves that none of us had ever seen and we saw them for the first time. To create something that noone's ever seen, ever done. I think people really underestimate that and they don't ... they take it for granted because we see so much and there's so many images. But authenticity is something we just don't care that much about anymore. It grieves me.

The fact that we're missing out on the divinity that exists in all of us. That moment of connection.

When you're watching, you're witnessing somebody's artistry um and it has meant something to you. The fact that we put a phone, a camera between us. You know, it just ... Part of our evolution as people and society has so much to do with our art.

Our art documents our civilization. From the very beginning of time.

People talk about how vapid sometimes pop music is or whatever. Well that's a direct reflection of who we are. How fleeting. How quickly people come and go...it is an aspect in all of us. I just want to propagate when i'm playing that people just for a moment just be in the room with each other, you know? Be on the elevator and look around. Experience each other's molecules, you know?"

She also told the interviewer she ditched a producer that mixed the recordings of one of her songs, made it (and her voice) sound "amazing" and that she said to herself "I sound amazing. I hate it." She never worked with him again, because he used autotune to smooth out the imperfections in her vocal tracks.




This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.