Sheryl Crow’s songs have long carried the weary perspective of someone grinding through life’s daily tests. Whether she’s singing about relationships or just the challenge of getting through the day, her music often finds meaning in the struggle — from “My Favorite Mistake” to “Every Day Is a Winding Road” and “Strong Enough.”
But few songs caused her as much trouble as “Leaving Las Vegas,” one of the key tracks from her 1993 debut, Tuesday Night Music Club. The song seemed to capture the frustrations Crow was living through at the time — a 30-year-old musician staring down a now-or-never moment in her career.
She had already paid her dues: working the dive-bar circuit, singing backup for Michael Jackson and Don Henley, and recording a slickly produced album that was ultimately shelved. But in 1992, things began to change when her then-boyfriend, Kevin Gilbert, introduced her to a loose collective of musicians he jammed with in Los Angeles. Crow began sitting in, and the chemistry was immediate.
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Those informal Tuesday-night sessions at producer Bill Bottrell’s studio became the foundation of Tuesday Night Music Club, named for the group of musicians who collaborated with Crow on its songs. Filled with rootsy Americana tunes and plenty of acoustic and electric guitars, the album soon yielded three hits: “All I Wanna Do,” “Strong Enough” and “Can’t Cry Anymore.”
It took me a long time to absolve myself from it. It was definitely a dark moment.”
— Sheryl Crow
Success, however, brought friction. Disputes over songwriting credits surfaced almost immediately, and no song sparked more controversy than “Leaving Las Vegas.”
The track captures the sense of world-weariness at the heart of both the album and Crow’s songwriting. Perhaps no line in the song summed up her life at that moment better than: “Such a muddy line between the things you want and the things you have to do.”
But Crow didn’t write that lyric. In fact, like much of Tuesday Night Music Club, the song was a collaborative effort between Crow and the musicians who made up the Tuesday Night Music Club.
The song’s title and central idea were also drawn from John O’Brien’s semi-autobiographical 1990 novel Leaving Las Vegas. O’Brien was a friend of Tuesday Night Music Club guitarist David Baerwald, who shares a writing credit on the song.
Released as the album’s third single, “Leaving Las Vegas” cracked the Top 75. Crow’s real breakthrough would arrive a few months later with “All I Wanna Do.” Still, “Leaving Las Vegas” performed well enough to land her a spot playing it on Late Night With David Letterman on March 21, 1994.
Afterward, Letterman asked Crow the song was autobiographical. Flustered, she answered, “Sort of.” After all, she had left Los Angeles before and understood something about starting over, and she related to the frustrations in the song. The moment hardly called for nuance, and saying “not exactly” might have sounded evasive.
Her co-writers didn’t see it that way. Some accused Crow of trying to claim the song as her own. Even before the interview, tensions had been building as the album’s success grew and some members of the Tuesday Night Music Club felt their contributions were being overshadowed by Crow’s rising profile.
Then the situation took a darker turn. O’Brien died by suicide shortly after Crow’s television appearance. His family publicly cleared her of any connection to his death, but some fans accused her of co-opting the experiences described in his novel.
Crow says the episode was devastating.
“I wasn’t the girl next door anymore. I was just — I was really broken,” she says. “It took me a long time to absolve myself from it, even though I’d never known him. But to have been sort of tricked — it was definitely a dark moment.”
Crow would go on to win three Grammy Awards on behalf of Tuesday Night Music Club, including Best New Artist. Her fanbase exploded album overnight, and included one fan who gifted her a 1959 Telecaster after her ’59 reissue Tele was stolen.
But behind her fame, the Tuesday Night Music Club was falling apart. It would be three years before she released a follow-up. Titled simply Sheryl Crow, the self-produced 1996 album was written amid the emotional fallout of Tuesday Night Music Club and served as a declaration of independence.
“My only objective on this record was to get under people’s skin,” Crow said, “because I was feeling like I had so much shit to hurl at the tape.”