I don't know about you, but I am loving having Sheryl Crow tell us the stories behind all the
songs on her collaborations album Threads, which is out now, and just getting to find out how she
ended up working with certain people, why she chose them for particular songs. This next one,
she sings with a band called Lucius. They're a four-piece indie pop band that got their start
in Brooklyn, New York, and they joined Sheryl on Don't. So, Sheryl, tell me about this one.
Don't is a song that is very inspired by Burt Bacharach. It was written by me for a project
for Broadway, a musical that I was and still am working on with Barry Levinson. And we've had
several incarnations of the musical go up, and we're now working on it again, hoping it's going
to go all the way to Broadway. And it was a great joy to work on something that's completely out of
my comfort zone, to be able to write for an idiom that I didn't grow up... I mean, I grew up loving
song and dance musicals. I wound up...
Watching movies on TV as a kid, you know, we didn't have 24-hour TV, and we would actually
see like West Side Story on TV and Oklahoma and My Fair Lady and all these great movies that had
music in them. And so when Barry Levinson called me and asked me if I would try to help him bring
the movie, try to translate it into music, it was just a great joy and also a challenge,
especially in a movie that has very few women roles, to actually bring a female presence
into this great screenplay. And so the song Don't is inspired
by a young woman who gets pregnant, but she also wants to have a career. And it's very timely.
And so I decided I'm going to put it on the record. It's my favorite song from the musical
diner. And I asked Lucius to be the background singers on it because they're this young group
who are clearly inspired by melodic songs. They write melodic songs. They have great harmonies.
They're just profusely talented and driven. And I love the blend. So they came in and sang on it,
and it was exactly what it needed.