Sheryl Crow’s has been one of my favorite artists quite for some time. Much of her music really moves me and the lyrics are often spot on with feelings I have. She hits that connection I don’t often get  where I feel an artist is accurately expressing things I’ve experienced. The Red Hot Chili Peppers do it with “Soul to Squeeze”. Garbage does it with “Medication” on the 2.0 album. But Sheryl Crow knocks it down more often than any other single artist.

Unsurprisingly, songs that strike me are mostly explorations on feelings and usually have somewhat of a melancholy tone. A couple of Saturdays ago while going to finish firing the last kiln in Bountiful I was set for a moody song and iTunes obliged me as dawn was breaking over the mountains by serving up Sheryl Crow’s “Good is Good”. This is an odd one for me in that so many of the lines really score:

When your friends are gone
You thought were so worth keeping
You feel you don’t belong
And you don’t know why

and

She put your books out on the sidewalk
Now they’re blowing ’round
They won’t help you when you’re down

The one issue I’ve had with this particular song ever since the first time I heard it is with the part of the chorus that goes:

And everytime you hear the rolling thunder
You turn around before the lightening strikes

And the fact that lightning proceeds the thunder kind of grates on me, and I feel that it’s kind of the heart of the song. I’ve spent a long time thinking about it and I believe that I’m just being too literal. Maybe you turn away from the storm as it starts and avoid closer lightning. Maybe it’s just a song and I shouldn’t pick at nits. But that morning driving along the freeway, for the first time, the unordered sequence didn’t seem to matter and I just soaked up the rest of the chorus.

And does it ever make you stop and wonder
If all your good times pass you by

The video for Good is Good