Sheryl Crow

If you’ve ever hobnobbed with a bunch of be-suited big-shots (or tried to convince an educated person of the opposite sex that it’d be a good idea to come upstairs and have another drink), you probably know it doesn’t hurt your cause to be informed. Reading the newspaper, watching CNN, keeping an eye on the oil prices—these things tend to work in your favor. And, if you happen to be a singer whose top singles have hooks like “All I wanna do is have some fun” and “I want to soak up the sun,” these activities might signal a legitimizing stride into a world weighing bigger issues than beaches and bars.

Sheryl Crow makes it quite clear where she’s striding from the get-go with her new studio album “Detours,” which bills itself as the work of a contemplative and reborn artist engaging in a weighty wrestling match with concerns ranging from the White House to a bout with breast cancer to a broken engagement with cycling star Lance Armstrong.

The political material comes first, and it comes strong. The album’s first and shortest track, “God Bless This Mess” might well be its best. With an acoustic guitar and a set of scratchy, vinyl-sounding vocals, Crow brings us a sobering vision of a country moving from the unifying emotion and tears of 9/11 to a much less galvanizing involvement in a “war based on lies.” The consequences are starkly depicted: a domestic tableau riven by a young veteran’s vacant manner and a society that’s wrung-out, disillusioned and distant. “Everyone I call up doesn’t have the time to chat,” Crow wearily relates. “Everyone is so busy doing this or doing that.”

From that point forward, Crow delivers five successive tracks with political content. She flashes some of her old colors on the album’s second cut, “Shine Over Babylon,” opening with the languidly conversational, almost flippant sort of vocals (more lazy recitation than melody) that were the hallmark of her number one hit “All I Wanna Do.”

But here, again, the subject matter has a deeper bottom. There’s an allusion to the “seven hills,” presumably of Rome; a couple stark rebukes to capitalist greed (“We celebrate the golden cow / Praise the bloated bank account”); and an invocation of Babylon, whose most salient historical bullet-point is that its walls came tumbling down. These references all paint a picture of an America that’s ready to crumble.

More of the same on “Gasoline,” where Crow, narrating a future oil shortage, takes a swing at “Those bastards up in Washington / Afraid of popping that greed vein.” She also draws our attention to the problem of climate change—the year is 2017 and, with the “sun… growing hotter,” London is suffering “sweltering heat.”

There’s no question that Crow has been reading her World Book—in the space of the first five tracks we’re taken on a travelogue that drops us at Lake Pontchartrain (in the up-beat post-Katrina ballad “Love is Free”), Riyadh, Alexandria, the Ganges, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, and Washington.

Of course, with worldly knowledge there’s always a catch: if you don’t want to sound like the name-dropping tool at a Rhodes Scholar cocktail schmooze, you’ve got to be ready to offer a little something more than a list of proper nouns. And sometimes, in the wake of “God Bless This Mess,” Crow’s erudite message gets a little garbled. It’s not clear, for instance, whether “Gasoline” is advocating a cut-back on emissions or a populist cut in oil prices (which would seem to have the opposite effect).

In the end, it doesn’t really matter, because Crow pulls out of the political ballgame a little more than a third of the way through the album, and starts playing on the old heartstrings. The album’s title track, “Detours,” is a plaintive address to a mother about the pangs of heartbreak (probably a nod to the Armstrong breakup). This is followed by a string of pieces in which Crow is sometimes frustrated and sometimes indignant about the same subject—namely, her shattered heart. One such track, “Diamond Ring,” proves too much for even the patient listener, who might only make it through the first couple rounds of a wretched Crow cawing about the jewelry she couldn’t have at the top of her lungs.

Fresh from her bout with breast cancer, Crow treats the trials of chemotherapy in the chillingly desperate, highly repetitive “Make It Go Away.” Soon after, the album ends inauspiciously with the nondescript, though certainly soothing, “Lullaby for Wyatt:” a stripped-down, decidedly gentle piece aimed at Crow’s recently adopted son, which might do well among tired babies and devotees of easy-listening radio stations.

Crow has made it clear that she doesn’t expect this album to have the success of her multi-platinum breakout work “Tuesday Night Music Club,” which sold over four million copies domestically and also represented her last collaboration with producer Bill Botrell. But at the very least, Crow will probably accomplish two important goals: satisfying her legions of fans with the traditional stuff, and maybe even drawing a sizable contingent of new buyers with the buzz created by her new, politically informed edge.

—Reviewer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.