Sheryl Crow's latest comes home to Memphis

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Sheryl Crow

Growing up in the Missouri bootheel in the '60s and '70s, Sheryl Crow naturally felt a strong pull to Memphis, the nearest big city. A hundred miles away from her home in Kennett, Mo., Memphis was where her parents would take the kids for new school clothes or to visit the dentist.

"We used to come to Memphis when I was a kid to Goldsmith's department store," the singer recalls. "We would go see Santa Claus there, and they had a little Enchanted Forest is what I think they called it, where you could go in and shop and your parents could watch you through one of those two-way mirrors. ... People didn't travel nearly as much as they do now, so when we went to Memphis, that was the big city."

Sheryl Crow grew up in the bootheel town of Kennett, Mo., and the '60s and '70s sounds of Memphis were among her earliest musical influences.

As she got older, Memphis also unwittingly became the center of Crow's increasingly important musical world. She would tune in to Memphis radio stations on her sister's AM radio -- to shows like "The King Biscuit Flour Hour" and deejay Rick Dees' program on WHBQ -- and discover Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins and the artists of Stax and Hi Records.

"I wasn't really aware that that music was indigenous to Memphis until I was quite a bit older," says Crow. "But that music that came out of Memphis was a huge influence on me, and really the first music I learned to play when I was in cover bands."

Crow returns to those sounds of her youth on her just-released seventh album, appropriately titled 100 Miles From Memphis, and her tour for it brings her back to the Bluff City Friday night for a show at Mud Island Amphitheater.

For Crow, the new record is a return to the blue-eyed soul -- inspired, in part, by acts like Stax's Delaney and Bonnie -- that defined her sound when she was just getting started in the early 1990s. At the time, Crow says, that sound got her turned down by every record company in Los Angeles. By the time she finally broke through in 1993 with Tuesday Night Music Club, her more country/R&B tendencies had been watered down. Over the years, though, friends and fans would ask what happened to the earlier Crow, the one who always keeps Al Green on her iPod.

"My manager, Scooter Weintraub, who has been working with me for 20 years, would always ask, 'When are you going to make that record?'" says Crow.

After the cathartic experience of making her last album, 2008's Detours, an effort that came on the heels of her 2006 treatment for breast cancer and her adoption in 2007 of her first son, Wyatt Steven Crow (she adopted a second son, Levi, this spring), Crow felt liberated enough to be herself. No longer worried about the charts or how she would be perceived, she set out to make the kind of record she always felt naturally inclined to make.

Bucking the trend of artists like Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis and the News and John Mellencamp, who have recorded here to try to capture some of the old Memphis music magic, 100 Miles From Memphis was made 2,000 miles away. Crow originally planned to make the record in the convenient confines of her home studio outside of Nashville. But when producers Doyle Bramhall II and Justin Stanley got caught in Los Angeles mixing Eric Clapton's new album, Crow went to them and knocked out the record in three weeks.

Despite the distance, Crow did manage to bring a little of Tennessee with her into the studio. Besides Keith Richards, who plays guitar on the reggae track "Eye To Eye," the record features guest appearances by a pair of Memphians: Singer-songwriter Citizen Cope, who was born here, backs up Crow on a string-ladened cover of his hit ballad "Sideways." And a serendipitous studio visit by Justin Timberlake resulted in his contributing vocals on Crow's version of the Terence Trent D'Arby song "Sign Your Name."

Not surprising, given her affinity for Green, both tracks are notable for featuring fairly accurate re-creations of the Hi Records sound, with that distinctive "wet" drum sound. In fact, it was that quality that led Timberlake to the project.

"One of the really great things about working in a commercial studio is you might run into people," Crow says of the chance meeting with Timberlake. "He was recording there, working with Jamie Foxx. We'd just finished recording 'Sign Your Name,' and I grabbed him and said, 'Come here. I want you to hear something.' He listened to about the first 30 seconds and turned around and said, 'You know I'm from Memphis?' And I said, 'Yeah, I know you're from Memphis.' And he said, 'Who's got the backgrounds? I'm going to do the backgrounds on this.'"

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Sheryl Crow with special guest Colbie Caillat

8 p.m. Friday at Mud Island Amphitheater, 125 N. Front St. Tickets: $71.88, available at the box office and through Ticketmaster. For more information, visit mudisland.com.

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