She’s released six studio albums in the last 16 years, and none of them have sold fewer than half a million copies. Regardless of how you feel about Sheryl Crow’s music — and my own feelings aren’t terribly warm — in purely commercial terms, she’s one of the most important artists of the last decade and change, and whatever her own artistic merits might be, her success helped open the floodgates for other female singer/songwriters during a time when the pop landscape was more male-dominated than ever. It all started with 1993’s Tuesday Night Music Club, which receives the deluxe reissue treatment from Universal this week, adding a disc of non-album tracks, B-sides, and unreleased material to the original album, plus a DVD containing every TNMC video and a new documentary.

She’s pop/rock royalty now, but in the early ’90s, Sheryl Crow was teetering on the edge of becoming a music business casualty; her greatest claim to fame was her stint as a backup vocalist on Michael Jackson’s Bad tour, and her intended debut album had been rejected by her label. Add all this to pop music’s generally jaded vibe at the time, and it isn’t hard to see how Crow could fall in with a group of ferociously talented burnouts looking for a little low-stakes jamming between dispiriting corporate gigs. Thus was born the Tuesday Night Music Club, a loose confederacy consisting of David Baerwald, Bill Bottrell, Dan Schwartz, Brian MacLeod, and Crow’s then-boyfriend (and future cult legend), Kevin Gilbert. Crow wasn’t the best songwriter in the bunch, but she was the best singer, and by far the most easily marketable, so it also isn’t hard to see how the sessions quickly turned into woodshedding for Crow’s second pass at her solo debut. (more…)