Tapping in and doing nicely

"Leaving Las Vegas" was on the radio, and it was really something. I was working at a local newspaper in Northwest Indiana, and I had a long commute. When that song came on the radio, it was a transport. I used to turn it up until the distortion ground up the speaker cones. It made me feel happy, and lively, and fresh, and bluesy all at once. WHich is good pop for you.

I didn't put much thought into it at the time, but Crow is the inheritor of a long line of tradition of female singer-songwriters. I suspect we could debate when it started, but I'd identify Billie Holiday as the inception, although she wrote only "Strange Fruit" and certainly that song is a flawed masterpiece. Then from her we can trace the tradition down through the folk singers, particularly the redoubtable Joni Mitchell, to the three or four guitar-strumming, piano-playing hit factories that the record industry doles out to an adoring public in a given year.

Sheryl Crow is one such. Tuesday Night Music Club is one of those cathartic, My Big Day My Big Chance records, in which we learn as the years pass Crow was in fact given a chance for which she had fought, through years of unthriving devotion to her work. And having bought this used, after checking it out of the library a few times and borrowing my mother's -- my mother's -- tape, I have grown to feel real affection for their simple, spare sensibility. They have the feel of good country music, hard work done well, delivered in Crow's versatile (if not virtuosic) keen. If you like "Leaving Las Vegas" -- and if you haven't heard it we can seriously hope that you find a radio somewhere on that desert island where this washed up -- you'll like the rest of the CD. "What I Can Do For You" and "Run, Baby, Run" are partuclar standouts. Every song is disciplined, clear, and solid. The backup musicians are superior accompanists. This is a good CD.

As you know, Epinions asks that we recommend other CDs based on their sounding similar. So I suggest Rickie Lee Jones, and Joan Osborne, and Joni Mitchell, the ur-singer-songwriter. And Michelle Shocked, and Sarah Maclachlan, and Poe.