These days, Sheryl Crow lives in Nashville, which makes perfect sense for an act whose music was always country-inflected. Nobody called her americana when she emerged in the 1990s at the vanguard of Women In Rock, but her voice nestles within the groove of roots music, and she was a great choice of headliner for Black Deer in 2024.
Famously a backing vocalist for Michael Jackson on his Bad tour, thanks to the propensity for guitars, either acoustic or electric, Crow’s catalogue can mostly be classed as melodic rock. Along with Alanis Morissette, she was on the edge of the alternative rock and singer/songwriter genres; indeed, ‘My Favorite Mistake’, which opened her album “The Globe Sessions“, is a song Crow has compared to ‘You’re So Vain’ by Carly Simon, because we have never learned who the subject of the song is.
The song opens with a palm slide up and down the fretboard, enhancing its in-the-studio feel, which is followed by an addictive, declarative riff. These riffs, some of which are played by Wendy Melvoin from Prince’s band The Revolution, are peppered throughout the song, often answering Crow’s vocals.
As with many blues songs, the first line of the first verse sees the narrator wake up at 6am, “all alone”, but here Crow does get to speak to her beloved by the phone. “The tone of your voice was a warning that you didn’t care for me anymore” sets up the song to come, set to an interesting palette of chords that resolve back to the initial key.
The man who leaves her, giving her a “perfect ending to a bad day”, prefers to spend time with a “secret lover”. Crow, who is “no fool”, knows that her friends can suss him out (“they watch you pretend to adore me”); she realises “nothing lasts forever” and that there is no “forever after” in their love. The middle section underscores the change in her state of mind by switching up the chords, introducing some new ones previously unheard in the song. There follows an eight-bar instrumental passage which allows both Crow and the song to breathe, especially after she holds “this way” for two bars after the middle section.
The final chorus changes up the melodic idea, as Crow sighs: “could you tell you were the only one that I ever loved?” Unlike the earlier choruses, she sings alone, taking the spotlight herself. Her voice sounds melancholy as she sings “everything’s so wrong”, and it soars upwards on “did you see me walking by?” The final chord of B minor is the same as the one that opens the song, and it is also notable that she sings the title of the song once in the first chorus, twice in the second and three times in the third.
Crow sounds exhausted and resigned to her heartbreak, with wordless ‘ooh’s in the introduction and not a hint of anger in her vocals. This is top-quality melodic rock that falls under the americana umbrella thanks to its rootsy chug, with musically inventive elements spread throughout the song. How many listeners, meanwhile, have their own “favourite mistake”?
