She’d already hit her thirties by the time of her breakthrough Tuesday Night Music Club. Now 43, the former Michael Jackson backing singer shows little sign of giving up the territory she’s so successfully staked out for herself over the last decade.
Crow’s longstanding success is no accident - she boasts multitude of talents, not least of them a great voice and an ability to write catchy, evocative pop-rock tunes, while her rock-chick-with-brains image doesn’t do her any harm at all either.
While not offering anything new in an artistic sense, Wildflower boasts all of the above elements in spades, albeit with a little less sonic adventure than she has displayed in the past. It starts out strongly enough, with the opening cut, ‘I Know Why’ coming across in a similar swaggering fashion as the country rock of Lucinda Williams. ‘Lifetimes’ faintly recalls her earlier hit ‘All I Want To Do’ while the gentle acoustic plucking and strings arrangements on the uncharacteristically wistful title track point to a mellowing out. In fact mellow is the predominant feeling here- most of the songs here rarely rise above a mid-tempo pace and there’s nothing near as “heavy” as the radio favourite ‘If It Makes You Happy.’
Crow’s obsession with 70’s rock is also well in evidence especially on the slow-burning rockers like the Tom Petty-influenced ‘Perfect Lie’ and the lighter-waving ballad ‘I Don’t Wanna Know’. The soaring, epic closing track ‘Where Has All The Love Gone’ (included here, along with the title track in two different versions) recalls George Harrison solo output especially All Things Must Pass.
Pretty good overall, but what she really needs to do is make a roots album with someone like Daniel Lanois or Steve Earle at the desk.