Have you ever felt caught between different worlds, your head still in one place and your feet in another, like when you get off a plane to ride back into your home city after travelling to a land where you spent time getting to know new people in an unfamiliar culture and making sense of their language and customs?
It can be much like waking up from a strange, engrossing dream with a mixture of relief and disappointment to find yourself again in a room where you've long known what's in every nook and cranny. After all, dreams summon the most unexpected things to mind and play such games with time that people have tried to understand them ever since before most knew how to write anything down.
And it's that feeling Sheryl Crow evokes in one song on her latest album, as today's musician, of how "We could live lifetimes in a single day"...
I knew things would be different somehow, but never expected the shock of sameness in the job, the news and the unchanged office surroundings that struck me on going back to work after some weeks' absence on sick leave. When my old musician friend dropped in fortuitously to say "Hi" and the desk chief passed by, BJ told him, "I'm catching up with Nick."
"So are we," David replied with a smile.
I didn't know what he meant, but it made me feel very odd for a long moment with the realisation that I need to catch up with myself. The routine workload of African stories was neither heavy nor light. It was mostly very dull and I caught up with the "news" in just a few hours, since it was mainly institutional propaganda and much ado about nothing that hapless agency reporters have to serve up to editors, just in case. In a world of such competitive media and constant information overload, they are "damned if they do and damned if they don't".
I listened to Sheryl Crow, first her 'Tuesday Night Music Club' of 1993, a popular album flawed by shabby production that did her no favours, especially on a slow jazz track like 'We Do What We Can', where a muted trumpet almost sounds as if it's in the wrong room, and then moved on to last year's 'Wildflower', where there is no such minor annoyance in sound quality.
My magic iPod finger couldn't have done better than to stop at Ms Crow and a meditative album made by a woman coming to terms with her 40s and asking questions she hasn't before. I'd avoided listening to it so far, given an undoubted flurry of reviews elsewhere and the already wide kind of fame that had her web site shut down for some days when it got more hits than it could take once Sheryl Crow (home) made her opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq widely known.
All I knew when 'Wildflower' came out was Sheryl was in love with Lance Armstrong, the cyclist who kept on winning the Tour de France. Now I learn that she purposely made a trip to an unfamiliar place with a language she didn't know before she recorded it, Spain.
Maybe that's what stopped my finger!
Crow is one of the many musicians regular critics love to hate and fans like to love, who has high-profile relationships too. It turns out that in February she broke up with Armstrong and was diagnosed the same month with breast cancer and a reassuringly "excellent prognosis" (Wikipedia). A raw deal!
So are a minority of the reviews for 'Wildflower', which I wanted to hear once the dust had settled, after pursuing my listening away from the mainstream to give you -- and me -- the far less well-known singers I've covered and will go on writing up.
I'm as bored by the endless insults people full of the clichés of prejudice about one another's free-thinking or conservative stances hurl back and forth in the press and on the Net as by the political acts that provoke them. Lee, round a few corners, must have got a shock to be elevated to Crow-like fame as a political agent provocatrice for the blasts she stirred by way of comments in a blog post that was a fairly mild-mannered reflection on "sellouts" (Odessa Street)!
That's what comes of raising politics.
The thread holding together these disparate reflections was a sense of disorientation. That's superficially in 'Wildflower' as well but the deeper insight of the album is growing on me. Lee's latest blog entry is about the nastiness of getting treatment for allergies. The edge in Crow's voice can be almost like she has a breathing problem too, but I find it attractive; she doesn't sound her age and while the album may have coincided with an affair, it's about more than her and the one guy. She is exploring the nature of love and seems lost in it sometimes.
Lyrically, well,
"You'd never risk it, inherently self-conscious,
So twisted, resting on your haunches (...)"
is one of numerous examples of strong writing and imagery. Musically, it's in the mainstream with a country feel that probably helped see it slated by some as dull, but I don't find it boring to listen to an intimate achievement where Crow laments the demise of protest singing then puts something else in its place.
The disorientation I felt today, reinforced in Sheryl's song-writing, was an acute awareness of the ephemeral nature of events in the news -- "more old, same old" of a sort I'd already planned to be even more ruthless in keeping out of the media when it's really not a story -- combined with everything that must have happened inside me to get into a state to walk into the Factory bizarrely expecting far more changes outside me.
I don't know who's catching up with whom any more!
But 'Wildflower' is without doubt an album that expresses the same intuitive sense of the age I found words for in last week's long chapter on the Zeitgeist. So now I'm expecting to find it elsewhere, not by absurdly searching for musicians to support my own insight, but since I believe it's there anyway.
I know my thinking can seem irrational when I say such things, but maybe I have made a very long journey indeed these past months still without fully knowing it yet. I just know there's a lot to understand in what I have learned. This is helped by songs of delicate beauty on 'Wildflower', such as 'Chances Are', which opens with the Indian tabla hand-drums more and more musicians are fond of nowadays.
Perhaps people, more widely even than I'd thought, feel the same profound need I did to slow down, turning into themselves like Sheryl Crow does here to be outgoing again, seeking less self-centred ways of expressing a love of the world and of what's most natural in it.
Skimming the reviews tonight, I've seen Sheryl collect the usual flak for daring to change, particularly in 'Rolling Stone' magazine, which is a typical example of what I'd never list on the left because it has gathered so much moss itself! Some lay into her just for being natural. It's not Crow who's trying to force for high notes, it's we who maybe owe ourselves the effort of listening to her words.
The "hard news" teaches you in 30 years that nothing really is new, but many of the albums I've been adding to the library, including career starters by newcomers younger than Crow and me are real "growers", not always easy to get into at first hearing, but rich, dreamy, poetic and deep when you do.
That's welcome news for humankind's centre of gravity right now -- not just my own. I am resolved to stay slowed down because I believe a whole lot of us need to slow down right now and put out feelers and exploratory tendrils like 'Wildflower' does. Today I was again told that before being forced to a halt, I was working too hard -- certainly I was "sweating the small stuff" far too much.
We journalists, in particular, really need to take a lesson from musicians much in the public gaze or out of it, like others who will stop my iPod finger to listen in. It's widely lamented, especially in the sciences, that knowledge is too fragmented and compartmentalized for anyone to have a grasp of the whole.
I don't believe this any more than I consider there's anything special in the alleged paranormal faculties the doctors tell me I've got. What seems irrational is not always wrong. An inability to explain certain senses we have is no more than a reminder science still has many puzzles to solve and probably will never answer some questions at all.
 "It all comes down to creating time
You don't always have to make it right
We'll all drive by with our hybrid lives
Chances are we'll make it back..."
There's no time like the present to go on turning to music for help you won't find in laboratories. It is absurd to be dismissive of Sheryl Crow because she doesn't rock as much as she did. She sings of "creating time" instead and that is something we find we know how to do when we slow down.
12:09:53 AM link 
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