John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” became an anthem for decades’ worth of antiwar movements around the world. But between the sing-along choruses, he mused on “sinister banisters and canisters, bishops, fishops, rabbis and Popeyes.” R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” summed up Reagan-era hopelessness in the face of seemingly eminent nuclear war, but Michael Stipe also let us know that “the other night I tripped a nice continental drift divide / Mountains sit in a line.” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” expressed the shrug of a disaffected generation: “Here we are now, entertain us.” Of course, there was also “a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido” with which to contend. Pop music always has trafficked in nonsense given meaning by context, in meaninglessness smuggled in along with meaningfulness (and vice versa). It’s a madness not without method: a megaphoned sentiment is deepened, refracted and refreshed when surrounded by surrealistic images that go by quickly enough to escape notice for several listens (or several hundred). For the last decade-and-a-half, this notion has been the central pillar upon which Sheryl Crow’s pop career has rested. Her breakthrough hit, “All I Wanna Do,” boasted a chorus straight from the teen-pop handbook: “All I wanna do is have some fun / I’ve got a feeling I’m not the only one.” But the verses microscoped in on the tiny details of an afternoon barroom scene, down to the labels on the beer bottle; with each chorus, Crow threw off the weight of the mounting details, giving the song its sense of propulsion. But it was with her second (and still best) album, 1996’s Sheryl Crow, that she truly climbed the dizzying heights of pure pop surrealism. Singles “If It Makes You Happy,” “A Change Would Do You Good” and “Everyday Is a Winding Road” all reached the Top 5 of one radio chart or another, and all were sterling examples of inspired nonsense whose choruses suddenly exploded them into meaning. I’ve spent the last decade wondering about the significance of finding “Benny Goodman’s corset and pen,” or why she’s “calling Buddy on the Ouija board”—and hitting play again to try to figure it out. Subsequent Crow singles regularly followed the same blueprint, from “There Goes the Neighborhood” to “Soak Up the Sun,” but the frequency of these flights of fancy has slowed. One reason for that is purely musical: Crow has always kept her ballads grounded lyrically, knowing that the rush of lysergic mental pictures embedded in, say, “A Change Would Do You Good,” might sound purposely obscurantist or even unintentionally funny at half-speed. As Crow’s singles have leaned toward the balladic, so it follows that she no longer hitches a ride with the vending-machine repairman or sneaks a line like “Jack off Jimmy, everybody wants more” onto the airwaves. Another reason may simply be maturity. As Crow has eased into her 40s (despite continuing to look 27) and into a very public courtship with champion bicyclist Lance Armstrong, she has turned her attention to matters of the heart with greater seriousness and purpose in her music. That impulse reaches full bloom on Wildflower, an album of surpassing loveliness that, lacking the immediate, infectious hooks of the past, takes its sweet time to settle under the skin. Wildflower has been dismissed by some critics as the inevitable mellowing of a confessed depressive who’s now happy in love, and it does have a bit of a glow about it—but it’s more in the soft insistence of David Campbell’s string arrangements and the gentle thrumming of the acoustic guitars than in Crow’s words. The melodies crafted by Crow and frequent co-writer Jeff Trott (who also plays guitar and co-produces several tracks) spiral up and drift back down on their way in and out of minor-key melancholy, as the singer wrestles with the questions inevitably raised by a new relationship. On Wildflower, each moment of acceptance comes with a moment of doubt tagging behind it; the singer can’t push over the walls she has erected around herself, so she carefully unbricks them, only to pull out the trowel and erect them again. The old melancholy isn’t gone by any means; it’s just couched in gentler music. In the liner notes, Crow thanks Elton John “for his great inspiration,” and “Always on Your Side” lifts a snatch of “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” But in “Someone,” John’s lyricist Bernie Taupin wrote about escaping a confining engagement, while in “Always,” Crow is the one being fled: “Butterflies are free to fly, and so they fly away / And I’m left to carry on and wonder why.” Without such revealing turns of phrase, several of Wildflower’s tracks must get by on dark sonic beauty alone. Campbell’s strings adorn all the tracks save one, creating a lush, dreamy landscape that’s so inviting that sometimes it takes a while to notice that Crow is saying nothing terribly profound. When she ponders that “Good is good and bad is bad” or drops a clunker like “I heard the sound, it was all around” or “Everything I know makes me feel so low,” the lines are sung so sweetly and cloaked in such warmth that it hardly seems to matter—at least, not while they’re playing. But thoughtful ballads like “Home” and “Strong Enough” (from Sheryl Crow and Tuesday Night Music Club, respectively) had the depth and nuance to hold up in the memory as well. The one track that could have been lifted wholesale from Sheryl Crow is the punchy, uncharacteristically up-tempo “Live It Up.” The chorus goes no deeper than the title, but the verses are set in a classic Crowian netherworld where Jesus is a hijacker who works at the pawnshop and “self-conscious” rhymes with “haunches.” But “Live It Up” already seems like a relic, a last-minute sowing of wild oats, a bachelorette party. The party may be over, but perhaps the morning after can be brighter. If Crow can figure out a way to address the concrete changes in her life with the kind of engaging abstraction she used to apply to winding roads and favorite mistakes, the seeds on Wildflower could grow into something remarkable.
