“I always had a strong sense of something missing, and that fueled my wanting to be an artist.” Crow is happy to be part of this equally important national conversation in 2022, but at the height of her fame, a few celebrities - including Crow herself - felt that they could discuss mental health so frankly. “The only way I can explain it is knowing as a little kid that I had a sense of melancholy,” she muses. We’re talking about it, because It’s still happening, not because of the song.”Īnother subject Crow opens up about in Sheryl is her lifelong mental health struggle. And the gift of that song is that it has been thought-provoking. … It does, sadly, give me an opportunity to make it a better song, but also to continue this conversation. So, it almost feels imperative, which I hate. “Up until this moment, it had never occurred to me to rework the song, but we are doing that now, really in light of the fact that we’ve had so many mass shootings even in the last 10 days.
Now Crow is planning to update “Love Is a Good Thing” for 2022, with hopes to release it as a benefit single.
“It doesn’t mean it was not an important song, and it doesn’t mean it wasn’t an important moment‘ she stresses. It may not have changed everything, but at least it created a public discourse.”Ĭrow confesses, “I’ve never thought that song was the best song I ever wrote,” but she appreciates the significance that “Love Is a Good Thing” took on in light of the Walmart battle. At least there was a moment where people were talking, and I guess as an artist, that’s the greatest outcome you can ever have - is to have a song that actually makes people talk and galvanizes a movement. (Twenty-three years after Sheryl Crow‘s release, Walmart stopped selling modern sporting rifles, including the AR-15, as well as certain types of ammunition.) “Now we’ve gone so much further and have semiautomatic weaponry that 18-year-olds can buy. “I think ultimately in the end, I may have lost some record sales… but the one thing that did come out of it, at the time at least, was that quit selling the ‘cop-killer’ bullets, which were the bullets that did real destruction,” she notes. Looking back on her decision to keep the controversial lyric intact, especially when gun control is a more urgent topic than ever, is still a “source of pride” for Crow. And for me, that was one of those moments where I felt like I had a huge support system under me saying, ‘If this is something you feel like you have to do, then do it.’ … I think part of it is, in the documentary, you see who my parents are, you see who they are now, but certainly who they have always been: people that have always felt like if you have an opportunity to do something good, then don’t ask, just do it. “But being given a choice of changing the lyric to ‘Kmart’ or changing it to a different discount center, which is what Walmart, seemed so much of a hypocrisy, as well as a straight-up liethat it didn’t seem like a choice. I mean, when you consider that you have a record label who’s investing a lot of money in what you’re doing and they’re also hoping that you’re going to sell a lot of records, they definitely were pleading that I reconsider, Crow recalls.
Therefore, shutting off one of America’s biggest music retailers was a massive professional risk. There was a lot riding on the record’s release: Along with the usual “sophomore slump” dread, as Crow followed up her quadruple-platinum debut Tuesday Night Music Club, she was also trying to dispel the wrong myth that she hadn’t been the creative leader on her first LP. This was a pre-iTunes, pre-streaming era, when physical music sales were the end-all and be-all, and in many parts of the US, big-box stores like Walmart were the only places where fans could purchase CDs. The protest song - which unfortunately is as relevant today, if not more so, than when it came out on Crow’s 1996 self-titled second album - included the line, “Watch our children while they kill each other with a gun they bought at Walmart discount stores.” As a result, Walmart refused to carry Sheryl Crow unless she agreed to change that damning lyric.
It’s devastating that we’re still having these conversations,” she says.
One moment featured in both Sheryl and in Crow’s Yahoo interview, about the track “Love Is a Good Thing,” is still especially tough to Crow to revisit.