In this 1998 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Sheryl Crow arrives three albums into her career, the voice behind “All I Wanna Do” and “If It Makes You Happy,” releasing her first record written entirely in the first person. She is 36, and she has just made the most exposed album of her life — one she had nearly shelved months earlier because she was not sure she wanted to be that honest on tape. It went on to win the 1999 Grammy for Best Rock Album.
The centrepiece is the story of writing “My Favorite Mistake,” a song she would spend the next three decades refusing to explain. It came so easily, she tells Petty, that she was convinced she had accidentally stolen it, and she started phoning friends and her publisher to make sure it was not already someone else’s. Crow rarely says who her songs are about, and she still will not here. What she does instead is describe exactly where the mistake came from without ever naming the man — which is a far more interesting answer than the one the question was fishing for.
The rest of the conversation fills in how she got to that point. She talks about watching herself back on the monitor, about the first time she heard “All I Wanna Do” come out of a car radio, and about opening for Bob Dylan. She recounts the night her guitar died mid-set, the shift into writing in the first person, and the piano lessons at six that came alongside a late start at talking.
Unseen since its original 1998 broadcast, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show, safeguarding the earliest filmed account of a song its writer has guarded ever since.
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