Sheryl Crow - Threads (2019) [Hi-Res]

“Making this album felt like a travel in time,” Sheryl Crow tells Apple Music. “There was a lot of reflection involved.” The trailblazing rock icon—whose conversational, subversive megahits helped soundtrack the past three decades—says that her 11th album Threads will be her last. But she isn’t retiring so much as changing gears; from here on, she’ll focus on releasing singles and playing shows. “I am unequivocally not going to stop touring,” she says. “I’ve had a wonderful, long career of making albums. I’m up for something different now.”

To cap off her LP era, Crow assembled a staggering crew of rock, blues, and country legends to sing alongside her, a roster that feels lifted from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. There are her idols, like Stevie Nicks, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Emmylou Harris, and Willie Nelson; friends and peers, like St. Vincent and Gary Clark Jr.; and next-generation superstars like Maren Morris and Brandi Carlile who are set to carry her torch. “These are people who inspired me to do what I'm doing, whose records I pored over as a young girl and studied as a young songwriter,” she says. “It's a history of my influences and a look forward.” So it's fitting that Threads includes a mix of original songs and classic covers, and one track that’s a bit of both: She and Johnny Cash duet on a new version of her 1996 song “Redemption Day,” which Cash covered in 2003 shortly before his death. Here, she tells us about a few of the project's highlights.