Sheryl Crow on 'battling depression' and beating cancer

She has toured with Michael Jackson, played alongside Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, while Johnny Cash recorded one of her songs and she duetted with Pavarotti. But Sheryl Crow’s new album is a more personal piece of work and is about connecting with people and being there for them when times are tough. The 64-year-old hopes the songs on Pick You Up allow people to experience the hope she feels when she sings them. Sheryl said: “I’ve been someone who’s been pretty outspoken about the journey that I’ve been on throughout my life, even from a young age, of battling depression, but also having this beautiful outlet, which is music. “It’s called Pick You Up because one of the things that’s happening to us is that we’re feeling so isolated, even though we are overly connected with ourselves. But I think just the mere act of asking someone you love how they’re doing. Just knowing that you have someone in your life that’s always there for you. That it’s not all doom and gloom, us against them.” Freight Train, the opening track on Pick You Up, is a slow ballad about loneliness and the quiet connections that bind people. Sheryl, who grew up in the farming town of Kennett, Missouri, where trains ran through the town, released it as a single ahead of the album. She added: “There is something beautiful about the sound of a train. It does take us back to when trains ran through our small town. But in the middle of the night, when you would hear one and you would know that you were in your bed in a safe place and every other kid in your town is in bed, and you may feel lonely, but you’re not alone.” Sheryl was born on 11 February 1962, the daughter of a piano teacher called Bernice and a lawyer called Wendell, who also played the trumpet. She studied music education at the University of Missouri, graduating in 1984, then taught music at a primary school, while singing in weekend bands. And when a producer hired her to sing on a McDonald’s advert that was worth two years’ teaching salary, she quit and moved to LA. She had been in Los Angeles for eight months and had no passport when she was hired for Michael Jackson’s Bad tour, which ran from September 1987 to January 1989. A month after rehearsals began, she was playing to 65,000 people in Tokyo. When the tour reached Wembley Stadium in London in 1988, Michael played seven sold-out nights to 504,000 fans - a world record at the time. Sheryl was determined to embark on a solo career, but an album she made in 1991 was shelved for sounding too slick. She then joined a weekly songwriting group at the Pasadena studio of the producer Bill Bottrell, which became the Tuesday Night Music Club. The group’s album, Tuesday Night Music Club, came out in August 1993 and was slow to take off, but All I Wanna Do became a hit in October 1994 and it turned into a blockbuster. At the 1995 Grammys she won Record of the Year, Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and she now has nine Grammys from 32 nominations. And the following year she sang a Mozart duet with the opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti at his charity concert in Modena, Italy. The concert, called Pavarotti & Friends for War Child, benefited young survivors of the Bosnian war. She said: “I’m so grateful. All those early hits, they took me to Europe, to South America, to Russia, places I would never have envisioned getting to go.” Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards joined Sheryl at her 1999 Central Park concert in New York, alongside Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac. “The fact I got to stand on the stage and play with Eric Clapton and got to play with the Rolling Stones and sing with Fleetwood Mac, it does not leave me how fortunate I’ve been,” said Sheryl. She wrote Redemption Day in 1996 after visiting Bosnia to perform for American troops, and country legend Johnny Cash recorded it in 2003, weeks before he died. His version was released in 2010 on the posthumous album American VI: Ain’t No Grave. Sheryl said: “When someone else finds something in your music and they want to put the DNA in it, it’s a really nice compliment.” Meanwhile, her song Real Gone opened Pixar’s 2006 animated film Cars. She said: “When they asked me to do it, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t know the first thing about writing a song for a kids’ movie.’ It wound up being our biggest streamed song - another gift.” In August she unveiled the theme for a new spin-off series, Cars: Lightning Racers, due in 2027. Diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer in February 2006, Sheryl had a lumpectomy, followed by seven weeks of radiation therapy. She added: “If my story helps someone else, I feel blessed. It’s an odd thing to have had breast cancer and to be in a Starbucks and have someone come up and say ‘I had breast cancer’, and you find yourself connected to this person.” In November 2023 Sheryl, who has sold more than 50 million albums worldwide, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Brooklyn, New York, by her friend, Laura Dern. Laura, the Oscar-winning actress and Sheryl’s former roommate, introduced her as a “legendary artist, poet, activist, friend, mother, daughter and all-around badass goddess rock star”. Not known to be in a relationship at the moment, in the 1990s Sheryl dated Eric Clapton and she introduced him at her 1999 Central Park concert as “a really good friend of mine”. But her best-known romance was with Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France winner, who she began dating in 2003 - announcing their engagement in September 2005, only to split on 3 February 2006, the same month as her breast cancer diagnosis. Sheryl said in a 2006 interview with the US broadcaster Diane Sawyer that the break-up was “like a death” and later told a podcast: “I wanted to have kids with this person.” Deciding, following her breast cancer treatment, to become a mother with or without a partner, she adopted a son, Wyatt, in 2007 and another, Levi, in 2010. Moving to Nashville in 2007, where the boys grew up on a 50-acre plot, Wyatt is now 19 and Levi is 16. Sheryl said: “It’s really funny. My ambitions are basically ‘What am I making for dinner for my teenager tonight?’ I’ll keep writing, because it’s part of my DNA. I’ll keep recording, because I love the process. I just want to keep being inspired. That’s really my mojo.” *This interview was broadcast on The Newsroom on the BBC World Service