# Audio CD
# Original Release Date : September 29, 1998
# Number of Discs: 1
# Label: A&M Records

Basic Track listing

1. My Favorite Mistake
2. There Goes The Neighborhood
3. Riverwide
4. It Don't Hurt
5. Maybe That's Something
6. Am I Getting Through (Part I & II)
7. Anything But Down
8. The Difficult Kind
9. Mississippi
10. Members Only
11. Crash And Burn

REVIEWS

Rolling Stone magazine
by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
RS 797

On "The Globe Sessions," her third album, Sheryl Crow has written perhaps the finest rock song about home renovation. "It Don't Hurt" has a buoyant, bluesy groove with lively autoharp accents, and Crow sings about a woman changing wallpaper and laying carpet in an attempt to shake the memory of some guy she is now determined to forget. By the end, she just loses it and bulldozes the whole place. "I left no trace of you at all," Crow announces in a charged alto so intimate that it sounds like she's singing into your ear: "Now I can sing my song again." She's back in charge.

Since 1993, nobody has taken care of Sheryl Crow's business better than Sheryl Crow. Before she made her debut album, Tuesday Night Music Club, with Los Angeles studio swells like singer-songwriter David Baerwald and producer Bill Bottrell, Crow had already completed an album – an expensive mistake recorded with Sting's producer, Hugh Padgham – which she wisely shelved. Later, in the face of doubts about her musical skills and what exactly she had contributed to the making of Tuesday Night, Crow responded by producing on her own – brilliantly – 1996's Sheryl Crow. Last year, when she and Mitchell Froom collaborated on the theme song for the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, Crow even figured out how to make her way through the showbiz strains of Froom's arrangement, a clever Shirley Bassey update that Mariah Carey could have sung in her sleep.

As someone who grew up studying piano and composition, Crow is a fairly diligent formalist, and her favorite form is Sixties and Seventies English rock, the loose and riffy melodicism of classic Faces, Eric Clapton and Exile-style Stones. She is also an Anglophile with a down-home heart – she was born in Kennett, Missouri, just sixty miles from Memphis – who belongs to that long line of Southerners, from the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd to Alex Chilton and the Black Crowes, in love with the strength and cohesive flash of great British music. On Tuesday Night, Crow recast the early-Seventies jam aesthetic with a contemporary songwriting strategy and production sheen. On Sheryl Crow, she applied powerhouse riffs to intricate melodies, juicing the combination with vocal harmonies and Nineties alt-rock noise.

The Globe Sessions, on the other hand, is not a record married to a particular sound or concept. Crow deemphasizes stylistic consistency in favor of unrestrained emotion. The songs often concern broken romances and the extremes to which Crow's characters will go to fix them or just let go. "I bring you everything that floats into your mind," Crow claims in "Anything but Down," then explains how little she gets for her efforts: "But you don't bring me anything but down." Sometimes the anger spirals down into deep hurt. In "Crash and Burn," a song about a woman in flight from her feelings, Crow sings, "In case you ever wanted to track me down/I take my cell phone to bed."

Even when she's knee-deep in personal woes, Crow doesn't forget to dance. "Anything but Down" may find her distraught, but she lays it out with a confident, strutting tempo, an insidiously catchy tune and a royal power-chord chorus. "Crash and Burn" is dream pop with shades of Ennio Morricone in the guitars but rendered with unflinching melodic clarity. She opens the album with "My Favorite Mistake," a seamless mix of white soul and sweet pop that is such an obvious rip of Elvis Costello that it's a tribute. In "There Goes the Neighborhood" – a fast-moving mind movie with the vibe of Peter Sellers presiding over a night at Andy Warhol's Factory – and "Members Only," Crow funks things up in the playfully focused way of her big Tuesday Night hits, "Leaving Las Vegas" and "All I Wanna Do."

There are moments of experimental temper. "Maybe That's Something" (which begins, "We lay around just like gurus in borrowed robes") is an atmospheric, folky piece in which Crow plays with pop poetry like a young Carly Simon. The Gaelic-flavored verses of "Riverwide" and Crow's long, word-y fling through "Mississippi," a previously unreleased Bob Dylan song, don't play to her strengths. More effective is "Am I Getting Through (Part I and II)," which shifts on a dime from contemplative ballad mode to unhinged rock & roll.

For Crow, The Globe Sessions isn't a big pop record figured out within an inch of its life: "Here are just some things I recorded," the album title suggests. In the end, it is Crow's singing that unites the record and conveys its passionate thrust. In "The Difficult Kind," Crow pleads to a "ball-breaking moon and ridiculing stars" in an Anglo-Missourian fantasy of a country song where Tammy Wynette and Ronnie Van Zant and the Rolling Stones all meet in the posh twang of Crow's mile-long phrasing. It's a lot to get into one heartbroken screened-porch ballad. But for Sheryl Crow, it's no problem. (RS 797)

Rating: 4 out 5

All Music Guide
by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Since her dense, varied, post-modernist eponymous second album illustrated that Sheryl Crow was no one-album wonder, she wasn't left with as much to prove the third time around. Having created an original variation on roots rock with Sheryl Crow, she was left with the dilemma of how to remain loyal to that sound without repeating herself on her third album, The Globe Sessions.

To her credit, she never plays lazy, not when she's turning out Stones-y rockers ("There Goes the Neighborhood") or when she's covering Dylan (the remarkable "Mississippi," an outtake from Time Out of Mind). However, she has decided to abandon the layered, yard-sale production and pop-culture fixations that made Sheryl Crow a defining album of the mid-'90s.

The Globe Sessions, instead, is the work of a craftsman, one who knows how to balance introspective songs with pop/rockers, one who knows how to exploit their signature sound while becoming slightly more eclectic. In that sense, the album is a lot like a latter-day album from her idols, the Stones -- it finds pleasures within the craft and the signature sound themselves. That means that there are no surprises (apart from the synthesized handclaps, of course) -- the Celtic homage "Riverwide" may be new, but it's not unexpected, much like how the whiplash transition in "Am I Getting Through" isn't entirely out of the blue -- but that's not necessarily a bad thing, since The Globe Sessions has a strong set of songs.

Since it lacks the varied sonics, humor, and flat-out weirdness of Sheryl Crow, it's never quite as compelling a listen as its predecessor, yet it is a strong record, again confirming Crow's position as one of the best roots-rockers of the '90s.

Rating: 4 out 5

Entertainment Weekly
by Ken Tucker
October 9, 1998

Crow's Globe Sessions can be heard as the flip side of Mitchell's refreshed interest in mass outreach. Coming off of two solid hit albums, Crow now offers music that tries to make its singer-songwriterly confessionalism less specific. The CD is a sustained yearning for privacy, solace, and escape, lest she (as the closing song title has it) ''Crash and Burn.'' Produced by Crow and mixed by Tchad Blake, the entire enterprise is filled with clatter and clutter -- guitar distortion, radio static, the sound of a phone left pulsing off the hook -- that convey a conflicted state of mind about love, fame, and the nagging feeling that she can't trust anyone's motives.

''I am scared that I'm weird,'' she says on ''Am I Getting Through (Part I & II),'' and answers the title question with a muttered, ''I don't care, I don't care.'' Even when she admits to insecurity, it's cast as an aside or a pun, as in her watery refrain in ''Riverwide,'' ''Don't bail on me.''

Which isn't to say that The Globe Sessions is unfocused or not catchy. It leads off with the devilish single ''My Favorite Mistake,'' whose bouncy melody almost disguises the fact that the title phrase refers to a wayward lover she can't quite dump. It's a measure of how good The Globe Sessions is that I couldn't pick out the Time Out of Mind outtake Bob Dylan gave her to record until I looked at the credits, and even then, ''Mississippi'' still seemed like just a nifty throwaway on an album of crafted keepers. And Crow, by the way, doesn't get enough credit for a wily sense of humor: Aren't the lines in ''There Goes the Neighborhood'' -- ''The photo chick made to look sickly/Is standing in her panties in the shower'' -- a good description of Fiona Apple's ''Criminal'' video? And how 'bout that ''hidden'' final cut, a Dylanly diatribe about the persecution of Bill Clinton?

Inspired by Mitchell, I dug out my tattered college copy of Blake's ''Songs of Innocence and Experience'' and damned if I didn't almost immediately come upon its message for Sheryl Crow: ''Love seeketh not Itself to please/Nor for itself hath any care/But for another gives its ease/And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.'' Or, less eloquently: Your favorite mistake might be a blessing in disguise, Sheryl.

Rating: A-

For some fairly shallow performers, there comes a time when their craft becomes a chore, when scribbling songs for the big follow-up album turns into a black-and-white deadline. Clever composers can almost disguise this ennui, burying it in a smarmy, sunshine-beaming mix. Key word: almost. Ergo, a trial spin through clever composer Sheryl Crow's The Globe Sessions evokes the faintest hint of a feeling that grows stronger with each successive listening--there's no sense that the artist intended this material as anything more than tepid album filler. A conversation with your local supermarket checkout girl would prove far more riveting than Crow's pretentious and all-too-casual observations (set to the tune, it must be noted, of some likable, jangly hooks). "Get out the camera, take a picture / The drag queens and the freaks are all out on the town," she purrs over chucka-chucka choogling on "There Goes the Neighborhood", which is probably what any self-respecting drag queen or freak would mutter once Crow moved in, scrounging for her now-patented vicarious cool. The closest The Globe Sessions comes to any palpable sincerity is during an actually-might've-lived-it, whoops-I'm-in-trouble-again "Mississippi". Even then, Crow drowns the moment in perfectly enunciated syllables, more prissy than alley cat prowling. Crow started out with a credible Tuesday Night Music Club pedigree, surrounded by visionaries such as David Baerwald (For this disc, she relies heavily on ex-Wire Train mainstay Jeff Trott). But they're gone, and things change, to the point where, if you support this silly sycophant with your hard-earned dollars, there's only one question that you'll need to be asked: Do you want paper or plastic?

Music-Critic.com
by Billy Aicher

Sheryl Crow is back with her third full-length major label release. Most of you probably remember her breakthrough album, Tuesday Night Music Club, with the hit "All I Wanna Do (Is Have Some Fun)." Her second album was a smash as well, probably doing a better job of getting her name out than the first. Sheryl Crow included such singles as "If It Makes You Happy" and "Everyday is a Winding Road." The new album's first single is "My Favorite Mistake" and has been receiving heavy rotation on the radio as well as MTV.

The new album is somewhat different than her previous works, focusing more on the music than before. The attention has been taken away from catchy-pop riffs, working for a more artistic approach. The guitars are more raw, with heavier chords. There is actually a guitar solo on the disc, in "It Don't Hurt". Led Zeppelin is a definite influence in the guitar style found on this disc. It is especially apparent in "Riverwide" which is slightly reminiscent of "Kashmir." "There Goes the Neighborhood" includes alto sax accompaniment, providing a backup solo in parts. And "It Don't Hurt" contains harmonica backup and solo work. Another addition is that of strings on some tracks, adding a bit of depth to the music.

What about the vocals? Well she has gone places there too. She sounds more mature, if not more depressing on this album than on those past. Yes, I know she has never been the happy-go-lucky type, but this one sounds sadder than earlier ones. She uses her voice as a musical instrument more as well, keying in to the other instruments and complimenting their sound. In sync with that more depressed song is the seeming lack of radio hit music. There are not as many radio-friendly tracks on The Globe Sessions as on Sheryl Crow. This can be a good thing though - maybe that way I will not be bombarded with Sheryl Crow all the time.

Well I suppose you would like an overall comment on the album. Should you buy it? I really don't care all that much if you do or not. I have the album and that is all that matters to me. It is quality work, much more musical than her early stuff. If you are a fan of her pop sound, you may be disappointed, because the only two songs that are even close to pop on this album are "My Favorite Mistake" and "Members Only". The first of which is on the radio, so you can hear it all the time anyway. The second is a little too lyrically harsh to be a radio song, unless they want to play "And all the white folks shake their asses/ Looking for the two and four/ I'll have mine in martini glasses/ 'Cause I can't take it anymore." It would be a nice single, but we will have to see. If you want to hear what I am talking about, go get the disc. I already have, and it was well worth it.

Rating: 4.5 out 5

Salon.com
by Douglas Wolk
September 1998

Sheryl Crow's sold enough records to earn the right to be willfully strange -- or as strange as a multiplatinum artist can get without raising eyebrows, which is not very. "The Globe Sessions" is the soul of normalcy by most standards, but after its cooing, radiofied opener "My Favorite Mistake," it's full of small gestures that show she's not entirely resolved to full-speed-ahead hitmaking: The overheated drama of "Am I Getting Through" ("I am scared that I'm weird/I'm afraid I am queer") is followed by a minute of off-the-hook beeping and a brief flash of coffee-nerves rock; "There Goes the Neighborhood" opens with messy sound effects and disco hand claps.

Crow's singing has undergone some odd changes, too -- instead of her familiar let's-get-the-hooks-out-front style, she half-swallows and half-croaks her lyrics. The music behind her tones down the prefab obviousness of "Tuesday Night Music Club" and "Sheryl Crow," with a curious but delicious mix by Tchad Blake and an all-star cast of studio pros including Wendy Melvoin, Benmont Tench and Lisa Germano. A lot of it works nicely -- laced with strings, the drum-loop pulse of "Riverwide" is genuinely lovely, and the lush organ sounds all over the album rescue it from sounding too 1998.

But then there are the lyrics. Despite a few lines that suggest she's pulling some kind of update on "Highway 61 Revisited" ("Schoolboy John's in jail/Making a killing through the U.S. mail"), Crow's not what you'd call a new Dylan -- and the old Dylan underscores that by contributing a throwaway that's nonetheless the strongest song here, "Mississippi," which she stopped production on the original version of the album to include. She does get off some surprising lines and images: the "ballbreaking moon and ridiculing stars" of "The Difficult Kind," the "apples from the vine" of "Anything But Down." On the other hand, she tries to rhyme "all the white folks shake their asses" with "martini glasses," "Blackstrap molasses" and "hanging out with the lasses" -- ouch. Maybe it's time for her to make her instrumental record.

Miami Herald
by Leila Cobo-Hainlon
September 29, 1998

Crow's new CD full of love, regrets, soul-baring

Herald Pop Music Critic Sheryl Crow has called The Globe Sessions, her new CD that's in stores today, her most personal work. ''If people hate it, I'm going to retire,'' she said in a recent interview.

People certainly won't hate this collection of love and regrets, laced with irony and more than a tad of self-deprecating humor (''I bring you everything that floats into your mind/ But you don't bring me anything but down.'')

But if you're expecting confessions, you'll be disappointed. This is soul- baring, Crow-style. The reserved Crow sure isn't going around saying who her lost love is in The Difficult Kind or who wronged her in It Don't Hurt. (Anyone looking for insights into her supposed relationship with Eric Clapton, forget it).

What Crow delivers is a down-to-earth album made with impeccable taste, from the edgy There Goes the Neighborhood to the bluesy Mississippi, a Bob Dylan song written for his last album but ceded to Crow instead.

Sessions highlights her production skills, as well. The addition of strings into her pop/folk melodies, notably the cellos in Am I Getting Through, is particularly effective.

There are no fireworks here, just a steady glow.