Sheryl Crow: ‘Making Albums is a waste of time and money!’

Sheryl Crow thinks albums are a “waste of time and money”.

The ‘All I Wanna Do’ hitmaker intended to stop making records following 2019’s ‘Threads’, and although she still thinks it’s pointless in a streaming world, she is set to release the follow-up, ‘Evolution’, on Friday (29.03.24).

The collection is inspired by Peter Gabriel’s song ‘Digging in the Dirt’ and features a cover of the 1992 hit, featuring the man himself, and nine other songs.

She told the May 2024 issue of Red magazine: “I still think [creating albums] is a waste of time and money! People don’t listen to records as a full body of work, but I had all these songs that felt very timely… So, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m not going to make a conventional album, thinking about the beginning, middle and end.’ Instead, it’s a compilation of new songs.’”

The 62-year-old star also shared how she found solace in music when she was growing up.

She recalled: “It was what I went to when all my friends started drinking and smoking pot and I felt left out. It was an identity crutch, and when it came time to figure out what I wanted to be, music was the thing I was good at.”

She added of being talent spotted singing in a bar: “I was singing in a bar when a producer came in and asked me to sing on a commercial. It was the first time somebody said, ‘I think you’re good, and I’m going to help you utilise what you do and you’re going to get paid for it.’”

The country pop star previously explained how she “loved” making all of her studio albums, but she feels it’s pointless to put all the effort into a whole body of work when music fans “cherry-pick songs” on streaming platforms.

Speaking to NME in 2019, she admitted: “I think more than likely it will be my last album.

“I’m really at peace about that. I have loved my career, I don’t feel like my career is over, but I feel like things have just changed so drastically.

“I’ve loved making records, I’ve loved producing, but I feel like for the love and the time and the emotion that goes into creating an artistic statement, a full body of work, that now with technology people kind of just cherry-pick songs, and it seems sort of futile to me.

“And this just felt like the right project to go out on: a project that is a timeline from my earliest years all the way up until now and even into the future.”

The musician reassured her fans that she will still release singles.

She said: “[This will] not [be] my last music, but probably my last album project as a whole.”