Tuesday Night Music Club is the debut studio album from American singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow, released on August 3, 1993. The first two singles from the album were not particularly successful. However, the album gained attention after the success of the fourth single, "All I Wanna Do", based on the Wyn Cooper poem "Fun"[7] and co-written by David Baerwald, Bill Bottrell, Sheryl Crow, and Kevin Gilbert. The single eventually reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100, propelling the album to number three on the US Billboard 200 albums chart. It has sold more than 4.5 million copies in the US as of January 2008.[8][9] On the UK Albums Chart, Tuesday Night Music Club reached number eight[10] and is certified 2× platinum.[11]
History
The title of the album comes from the name for the ad hoc group of musicians including Crow, the "Tuesday Music Club", who came together on Tuesdays to work on the album.[12] Many of them share songwriting credits with Crow.
The front cover of the album shows Crow wearing a denim shirt with "a sheepish smile".[13] The back cover has a neon cafe sign[14] of the "Jenny Rose Cafe", consisting of the heart-shaped neon light behind the sign "CAFE" and above the other sign "JENNY ROSE".[15][16]
The group existed as a casual songwriting collective prior to its association with Crow, but rapidly developed into a vehicle for her debut album after her arrival. (At the time, she was dating Kevin Gilbert, who co-wrote most of the songs for this album with Crow, David Baerwald, David Ricketts, Bill Bottrell, Dan Schwartz and Brian MacLeod.) Her relationship with Gilbert became acrimonious soon after the album release and there were disputes about songwriting credits. In interviews later, Crow claimed to have written them. Both Gilbert and Baerwald castigated Crow publicly in the fallout, although Baerwald later softened his position. A similar tension arose with Bottrell after her second album, on which he collaborated during the early stages.
In February 2008, Bottrell said, "The truth is hard to describe, but it lies between what all the people were shouting. It was all very vague and very complicated. She wrote the majority of the album. The guys and I contributed writing and lyrics, including some personal things. However, the sound was the sound that I developed".[17] However, this was said while promoting their most current work together and contradicts most previous statements by him including those in Richard Buskin's highly detailed book about the situation. Bottrell in earlier times had said Crow was given the second-largest portion of the publishing splits on the album in order to motivate her to work hard, as she still had to pay the very large debt from her unreleasable real first record, publishing being the only way she was likely to earn any money from her new record.
Travis Tritt's 2002 album Strong Enough features a song titled "Strong Enough to Be Your Man" and was written as a reply to Crow's original song.[18]
Tuesday Night Music Club was expanded for a 2009 re-release. The 2009 deluxe edition features the original 1993 album, a second CD containing B-sides, rarities and outtakes and a bonus DVD featuring the album's six original videos plus a rare alternate version of "All I Wanna Do" directed by Roman Coppola. The DVD also includes a newly produced documentary composed of on-the-road, backstage, soundcheck and live footage from Crow's early 1990s tour in support of the set. Four of the previously unreleased recordings on the bonus CD—"Coffee Shop", "Killer Life", "Essential Trip of Hereness" and "You Want More"—were recorded in 1994 and intended for Crow's follow-up album. The cuts were mixed for this album by original Tuesday Night Music Club producer Bill Bottrell. The bonus CD also includes a trio of UK single B-sides—"Reach Around Jerk", an alternate version of "The Na-Na Song" titled "Volvo Cowgirl 99" and a cover of Eric Carmen's "All by Myself"—as well as a cover of Led Zeppelin's "D'yer Mak'er" and the song "On the Outside", which was released as part of an X-Files soundtrack album.[19]
Reviewing the album for the Chicago Tribune, David Rothschild wrote that Tuesday Night Music Club "has a loosely-structured intimacy that perfectly compliments the straight-up, personal tone of Crow's rock 'n' roll story-telling and vocals."[20]Vox's Patrick Humphries called it a "confident and assured" debut "bubbling over with heady music from all sources",[28] while Q's Ian Cranna found the music "stylish, but not slick" and highlighted the mixture of "irony, imagination and observation" in Crow's "charged lyrics".[23] Dennis Hunt of the Los Angeles Times commented that Crow "sings with the seductive quirkiness of Rickie Lee Jones",[21] a comparison echoed by Jon Pareles in The New York Times, who added that Crow's best songs "are terse and well observed, and her voice makes even the lesser ones sound genuine."[29]
In a retrospective appraisal, AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted Tuesday Night Music Club's "loose, ramshackle charm" and concluded that "even with the weaker moments, Crow manages to create an identity for herself – a classic rocker at heart but with enough smarts to stay contemporary."[1] Terry Staunton lauded it as "a stone cold 90s classic" in Record Collector, opining that despite the album being collaboratively written, "it's Crow's distinctive vocals... that caught the ear and led to Grammy recognition."[24]Tuesday Night Music Club was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die,[30] and was ranked at number 94 on a 2017 list by NPR of the 150 greatest female albums of all time.[31]
"I Shall Believe" (Crow, Bottrell) (New 2009 remix) (4:35)
Disc 3: Bonus DVD
"Valuable Stuff": A documentary featuring on-the-road, backstage, soundcheck and live footage recorded during the Tuesday Night Music Club Tour, 1994–1995
"Leaving Las Vegas" (Crow, Bottrell, Baerwald, Gilbert, Ricketts)
"All I Wanna Do" (Cooper, Crow, Bottrell, Baerwald, Gilbert)
* Sales figures based on certification alone. ^ Shipments figures based on certification alone. ‡ Sales+streaming figures based on certification alone.
^"Single Releases". Music Week. September 25, 1993. p. 25. Misprinted as the previous week, September 20, on source.
^"Single Releases". Music Week. February 5, 1994. p. 29.
^Borzillo, Carrie (April 16, 1994). "Sheryl Crow's 'Music Club' High-Flying Debut for A&M". Billboard. Vol. 106, no. 16. p. 100. The week of April 4, A&M took ['Leaving Las Vegas'] to the next step—top 40.
^Caulfield, Keith (January 25, 2008). "'Good' Is Not So Good". Ask Billboard. Billboard.com. Archived from the original on January 29, 2008. Retrieved November 5, 2011.
