Sheryl Crow still fills venues with diehard fans wherever she plays, and recently shared her new single “Halfway There,” at the legendary Troubadour in Los Angeles. At 55, time and wisdom have brought richer perspective to life for the singer-songwriter after a decade since her breast cancer diagnosis, but more than ever, she urges women to stay both vigilant and proactive regarding their health. Just as with her prolific career in song, she keeps on patrol for the next great idea, in music, in creativity, and in the crusade to defeat Cancer.
No time to wait
“it was a routine mammogram,” Cheryl describes in her conversation with Rita Braver on “CBS Sunday Morning.” “It was a very inopportune time,” she recalls, thinking back to 2006. “It was right before the Grammys, my personal life was kind of in a turmoil, and the last thing I wanted to do was have a mammogram. But I did.”
That inconvenient choice would change Sheryl Crow's life even more dramatically than her choice to leave her career as a young music teacher, move to LA and chase her dreams in music. The initial advice after a finding of “something that's kind of suspect” was to come back in six months, but fortunately, the songwriter’s gynecologist took a different tack.
“There is no six months.
You don't wait,” came prevailing counsel. A needle biopsy showed that Sheryl’s cancer was invasive, so a lumpectomy and 33 radiation treatments followed.
Those immobile moments provided time for much-needed reflection on life, after the time of “everything swirling” amidst the diagnosis. Her long-term relationship with Lance Armstrong had ended, and her diagnosis seemed only to drive her to the A-list of celebrity news, which was “such an intrusion” in the fight of her life for the composer who guarded her offstage life.
Sheryl Crow persisted, and in the process of reclaiming health, she became a student of proactive screening tools.
Life of her own design
The free-spirited creator of “Soak Up the Sun” and “If It Makes You Happy” decided to make herself happy after her clear chart of no findings after treatment. She took her own mother's advice to have children on her own, and she lavishes love and attention on six-year-old, Levi, and older brother, Wyatt, 9.
Besides her thriving music career, and creative collaborations with artists like Gary Clark, Jr., among others, on her latest album,"Be Myself," releasing April 21, Crow makes no apologies about being a spokesperson for Hologic, a company which has created a premier 3-D imaging machine for mammograms. Crow insists that “he can be the real difference between a real harsh treatment, or something that's early, and is ultimately a cure. “ She knows that the girls who started out as her loyal fans have daughters of their own now, and that's her reason for making every platform that she has part of her appeal.
Sheryl Crow will be launching her clothing line on HSN soon, purposely aiming at the market “who can’t afford $350 jeans.
Those are the people who buy my records,” she echoes. The style is real and wearable, perfect for a joy ride on a Harley, or a beach chair.
In the mid-80s, no one knew what to make of the crystal blue-eyed singer who wrote commercial jingles, and could wail the blues while shredding on guitar, so she made her own way, with unforgettable songs. Sheryl Crow is still breaking new ground, as champion for the cure to cancer, living and singing as she goes.
