The Globe Sessions

1	My Favorite Mistake 4:07
2	There Goes the Neighborhood 5:01
3	Riverwide 4:07
4	It Don't Hurt 4:49
5	Maybe That's Something 4:18
6	Am I Getting Through, Pts. 1-2 5:31
7	Anything But Down 4:18
8	The Difficult Kind 6:19
9	Mississippi 4:41
10	Members Only 4:57
11	Crash and Burn Work in Progress / Mix 13:51
12	[Untitled Track] CD-ROM Track 3:59

Barnes & Noble

Sheryl Crow wrote many of her GLOBE SESSIONS songs on bass and the effect is obvious. Although she sings about the frustrations of relationships, the songs (especially "Anything But Down," "Members Only," and "My Favorite Mistake") have taut, muscular rhythms -- proof that it pays to have a solid foundation. Throughout, Crow believes in love as emotional extremity rather than rapturous compromise, and these songs chronicle her experiences with warmth and humor. On "It Don't Hurt," she describes a home redecoration undertaken to erase the memory of an ex: down comes the wallpaper, in goes the carpet, then she rewires (and cruises the electrician). By the end, though, Crow has "packed up and moved out after all/Bulldozed the house and watched it fall/That blessed sight I still recall," admitting that "It don't hurt like it did/It hurts worse/Who do I kid?" Such candor typifies the record -- Crow may model Tommy Hilfiger threads, but here she's naked as a jay bird. Martin Johnson

All Music Guide

Since her dense, varied, post-modernist eponymous second album illustrated that Sheryl Crow was no one-album wonder, she wasn't left with as much to prove the third time around. Having created an original variation on roots rock with Sheryl Crow, she was left with the dilemma of how to remain loyal to that sound without repeating herself on her third album, The Globe Sessions. To her credit, she never plays lazy, not when she's turning out Stones-y rockers ("There Goes the Neighborhood") or when she's covering Dylan (the remarkable "Mississippi," an outtake from Time Out of Mind). However, she has decided to abandon the layered, yard-sale production and pop-culture fixations that made Sheryl Crow a defining album of the mid-'90s. The Globe Sessions, instead, is the work of a craftsman, one who knows how to balance introspective songs with pop/rockers, one who knows how to exploit their signature sound while becoming slightly more eclectic. In that sense, the album is a lot like a latter-day album from her idols, the Stones -- it finds pleasures within the craft and the signature sound themselves. That means that there are no surprises (apart from the synthesized handclaps, of course). The Celtic homage "Riverwide" may be new, but it's not unexpected, much like how the whiplash transition in "Am I Getting Through" isn't entirely out of the blue. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, since The Globe Sessions has a strong set of songs. Since it lacks the varied sonics, humor, and flat-out weirdness of Sheryl Crow, it's never quite as compelling a listen as its predecessor, yet it is a strong record, again confirming Crow's position as one of the best roots-rockers of the '90s. Stephen Thomas Erlewine