SONG BIRD

JOURNALISTS can be terribly unfair to Sheryl Crow. And patently wrong about her music. Namely, this journalist. I certainly regret leaving unchallenged Colin Devlin's assertion, made in an interview in this newspaper roughly a year ago, that "if she wasn't a musician she would probably be a model". But then this perception of the "sexy babe" currently peering from the cover of all manner of magazines, from Hot Press to Rolling Stone, clearly is one that is shared by many.

Indeed, Sheryl claims that the thrill of seeing herself on the cover of Rolling Stone after at least a decade of struggling as a musician is somewhat "bittersweet" because of similar assumptions. But first, she wants to address that comment by Devlin.

"I face chauvinistic comments like that every day of my life. I could play a rocking show and the review will start with `leggy blonde' so it's idiotic male chauvinism, and disappointing coming from the Devlins, who toured with us," says Sheryl. "As for Rolling Stone asking me to be on the cover, I'm older than a lot of these other rock people at the moment, so my references are different. I didn't grow up with MTV so I remember, as a kid, waiting for Rolling Stone to come out with all those great black and white photos of Robert Plant and Mick Jagger.

"It's more of a lifestyle magazine now, less about music. And the funny thing is that I had a massive amount of popularity after the Grammies - and Rolling Stone chose not to put me on the cover because they weren't sure if I was an artist, or not. I think they had the attitude Colin Devlin did. So they put Alan is, Liz Phair, Joan Osborne on that cover. So it is slightly bittersweet now."

As part of the chauvinism - or sexism - that still rules rock, Sheryl Crow is inevitably rated alongside her female peers. But if you listen closely to the organ licks rippling through her new album you'll surely see a trace of Dylan dancing on her fingertips. The rhythmic riffs in Hard To Make A Stand resonate with her love of the Stones. And if you really want to know what gave Sheryl more of a kick than appearing on Rolling Stone, it was getting to sing with Jagger and the man who wrote yeah, you guessed it - Like A Rolling Stone.

"That was so much heavier than any magazine cover! Like, standing there next to Dylan, or Jagger, or Clapton, and thinking `I never dreamed this would happen'. And it was great knowing they even knew my music," she says, sighting. Sheryl also acknowledges that Dylan and other folk singers like Richie Havens and Joan Baez were her original influences. "Especially in terms of that narrative story line I use, like you hear in Irish folk songs. And I was into Van Morrison, Hank Williams, though the blues probably influenced my playing most of all," she says. But does playing with someone like Dylan reawaken the fan in Sheryl Crow?

"Absolutely! While I was making this album I went to see Dylan, and he asked me up on stage to play accordion and we were trading licks, and for weeks afterwards I was in a daze, listening to nothing but Dylan. It was like a rebirth!" she asserts.

That said, let's not push sex appeal out of the equation. Part of being a fan can be fantasising about one's idol, particularly someone like Jagger. "Well, I do think talent is a very powerful thing. In fact, it's extremely sensual and I've always been attracted to the power and the emotional aura of talent," she says, exceedingly cautiously. "But it's bigger than just wanting sex. I remember seeing Peter Frampton when I was about 15 and that awakened a whole set of different emotional responses and it's not always easy to separate such feelings.

If Sheryl is tentative when it comes to revealing details about her private life, she obviously has reason to be. The Book, from her new album, is "about somebody who feels like they've been violated, that they revealed themselves and it got turned on them," she has said, admitting she "got a few first hand experiences of that in the past couple of years". But what's probably more interesting about the song is that she claims the attack on the "violator" was created "on mike" as a form of action painting in sound.

"Twenty five per cent of this record was created on mike, which can be either great or a load of bunk!" she says, laughing. "But that is how I create a lot of my stuff, on a subconscious level, which makes it hard to answer, when people ask `so, what is the song about?' I also don't like answering that question because it takes the power away from the listener, to define it for themselves in any intrinsic way. And a lot of the time I don't realise what a song means until after the event. They're just things I need to express. Another song on this album, Redemption Day, I wrote on a computer in about eight minutes. And I don't usually write overtly political songs like that."

Sheryl Crow may, indeed, need redemption. She certainly seems to have her enemies in the music business, if we are to believe that current issue of Rolling Stone. It claims that the "poster boy for the anti Crow camp" would be Kevin Gilbert, "were he still alive". Gilbert was found dead in his home on May 18th this year, as a result of "auto erotic asphyxiation". He also co wrote All I Wanna Do with Crow and was her boyfriend. She claims not to have read this article but rejects the slightest suggestion that she can be held in any way responsible for his death.

She has also taken flak over the suicide of John O'Brien, author of the novel (later a film), Leaving Las Vegas. This was also the title of a song written by Crow and her then band Texas Music Club for their debut album. According to Rolling Stone, O'Brien shot himself three weeks after Crow appeared on the Late Show With David Letterman and claimed the song was "autobiographical", without acknowledging any input from either Gilbert, who co wrote it, or O'Brien. This appearance was her major TV breakthrough, and the lack of acknowledgement reportedly incensed both Gilbert and O'Brien.

Crow responds: "Kevin did die, but he had a lot of girlfriends between my relationship with him and his death, and none of them are famous so they won't get written about. And as for John O'Brien, I didn't even know him, didn't know about the book." But all those shadows contribute to the mood of the new album, she says. "Kevin was a really unhappy person, who was tortured, and I had to reckon with that before he died, at the end of my relationship, because it was a really destructive relationship. And caused me a lot of pain, took me a lot of time to get over it. And when he died, when I got that phone call, I was not surprised. It was an accident, but even so here was a person who wanted nothing more than to be famous.

"And the irony of it is that if he would have died of a heroin overdose he'd at least have gone out with rock'n'roll dignity. His whole life was based on being really frustrated because no one acknowledged him, or whatever. Then he dies in a way that people feel is disgraceful. But I don't feel it is disgraceful. I hate it. It was just such a waste, that he died, at all."

But allowing for the fact that they were lovers and part of a band together, could Kevin deal with Sheryl's success? "No. That's why he lashed out at the end and said I wasn't even around for my record, when not only did I write, but I played on every track. And, sure, all of this did get me down, because I do, anyway, have problems with depression."

Some commentators suggest that All I Wanna Do is about someone contemplating suicide. Is it? "No, it's more about a guy who feels like becoming a complete derelict, which is why I think the video we did for it doesn't even touch on the real meaning of the song," Sheryl explains. "And now I see to it that I'm more in control of my videos, at every level, than I was at that time.

And what about relationships? In some interviews she claims to be "not dating anyone", whereas that clearly contentious issue of Stone says she's been involved with one particular guy for the past three years. "Actually, up until the Rolling Stone article I was dating him!" she says, laughing lightly. "But we've been going through hard times in the last year. And the fear of a relationship becoming stagnant, being bored certainly surfaces on the record. Home, on the new album, is about the fear of a relationship becoming stagnant, being bored. It's about a 45 year old woman looking back and regretting she didn't sow her wild seeds, or whatever, But then I look at it and think it's more autobiographical than that. So all of that stuff comes across on this album. But, in the end, I would have to say that if anybody wants to know who I am, or what I'm about, they should just come and see me play.