Sheryl Crow doesn’t expect her new album to be a chart topper.
The 55-year-old singer will release ‘Be Myself’ later this month but is realistic about her expectations for the record and is just thankful she is an "elder stateswoman" of music and doesn’t have to compete with younger artists.
She said: "I know that commercial pop music is really geared towards young people.
"I don’t for one second kid myself that this record is going to shoot up the charts and be bought by a bunch of 13 year olds. It’s just good if it gets heard.
"And now being one of the elder stateswomen of music… I look around and go, ‘Oh gosh, there’s just so much manoeuvring to be the next sexiest, the most trending.’ I just think, wait till you get to the point where you’re just happy to be who you are. It is liberating!"
The ‘All I Wanna Do’ hitmaker – who has sons Wyatt, nine, and Levi, seven – admits she couldn’t see herself starting out in music nowadays because things are so sexualised.
She said: "There’s no way I could do it. I remember on my first album, this stylist came in with all these gorgeous clothes. I was, like, ‘Urgh!’
"I thought to myself, ‘I have to make sure I don’t look glamorous because I want to be taken seriously.’ So on my first couple of albums, you couldn’t even see what I looked like – everything was blurry and I wore trashy clothes."
And Sheryl recalls being horrified when she saw the first edit for the video of her 1996 single ‘If It Makes You Happy’.
She said: "The way they shot it, you could see up my skirt. And when I got the cut, I said to the record label: ‘We’re going to have to re-edit this thing because you can see my underwear.’
"And they said: ‘Is that really a bad thing?’ We went through it and cut it frame by frame."