Over the last two years, Sheryl Crow’s life changed in ways she never could have imagined: a cancer diagnosis, a broken romance, a cross-country move and newfound motherhood. In a revealing interview, she explains how the upheavals shaped a new look at her life, her music and her country.

February 2006 was a trying month for Sheryl Crow. First her high-profile, two-year romantic relationship with champion cyclist Lance Armstrong came to an end. Then, just weeks later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
By the end of the year, things were beginning to turn around. After a lumpectomy and seven weeks of radiation, she was cancer-free—as she remains today. In October 2006, she moved from Los Angeles to Nashville.
“I wanted to get closer to home,” she says, settling in at her Music City home after having lunch at an Italian restaurant with sister Kathy, who has lived there for two decades. “I’ve always gravitated to this part of the world. It’s very similar to where I grew up.”

That would be Kennett, Mo., about 200 miles away, where Crow was born 46 years ago to a trumpet-playing father and piano-playing mother. After college, she worked as a music teacher before a burgeoning sideline career singing commercial jingles emboldened her to move to L.A. in 1986. Work as a background singer for Michael Jackson and Don Henley led to a solo recording contract and her 1993 debut, Tuesday Night Music Club. After a slow start, the breakthrough of the third single, “All I Wanna Do,” helped propel the album to septuple-platinum status and establish Crow as a major player in the 1990s’ wave of female singer-songwriters.

Over the last 15 years, she has lived up to that promise again and again. After a falling-out with Tuesday Night producer Bill Bottrell, she took the production reins of the self-titled 1996 follow-up and proved herself capable of guiding her own artistic destiny. Hits like “If It Makes You Happy,” “Everyday Is a Winding Road,” “My Favorite Mistake,” “Soak Up the Sun” and “Always on Your Side” have simultaneously deepened her critical reputation and kept her in the public eye—so much so that her September 2005 engagement to Armstrong and their breakup five months later were irresistible fodder for supermarket tabloids.

The double whammy of the split and the cancer diagnosis led her to her Nashville farm, a peaceful environment that afforded her the opportunity for much-needed reflection. Finally she decided to take charge of her personal life the same way she had taken charge of her music 10 years before. “At that moment, I wanted to be writing my own story again,” she recalls. “I looked at my life and said, ‘What is it that I really want? Who is it I want to be?’”

The answer: She wanted to be a mother. So in May 2007, she adopted a two-week-old baby she named Wyatt Steven Crow. His presence throughout the writing and recording of her sixth studio album inspired Crow to examine the world he will inherit.

For more, get the latest Issue of Performing Songwriter, ISSUE No. 108