Sheryl Crow said in 2019 that her album Threads would be her last one, but she’s just released a new one, Evolution. Sheryl, a mom of two teenage boys, says music is her go-to anytime she gets emotional about anything, and in recent times, there’s been a lot of those moments.
“The past couple of years, particularly COVID on, it’s been a time for me of real soul searching and self-examination,” she tells ABC Audio. “And also raising boys, and some of the questions that they have now — which are so much more worldly than I would have had at their age — I’ve just been in a thoughtful place. And this album really was just an emotional download of everything that I’m experiencing.”
Because Sheryl’s emotional outlet is music, she says, “It is kind of like therapy. Except for I don’t have someone asking me questions. I’m sort of asking the questions of myself.”
“You can hear in the songs, there’s a lot of self-examination, but also a lot of what I feel like are letters to my kids, letters to myself — reminders and affirmations,” she explains. “And there are some questions that I think we’re all asking ourselves, like, what does this mean to have artificial intelligence come into our lives?”
Sheryl is one of more than 200 artists who just signed an open letter to AI developers, asking them not to use the technology to “steal professional artists’ voices and likenesses” and “violate creators’ rights.”
“What is it going to mean to our search for truth? And are we even going to search for truth anymore?” she asks of AI. “I mean, truth seems to be really dependent on our algorithms and what we already believe, and that seems such a dangerous place to me.”
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