Tuesday Night Music Club by Sheryl Crow

Tuesday Night Music Club, Sheryl Crow's debut album, came out on A&M on August 3, 1993, and for a while it looked set to slip past without a fuss. Bill Bottrell produced it, and the record has the loose, lived-in swing of players who'd rather jam than pose: pop rock with a country drawl, a streak of blues grit and a folkie's eye for the small details, all of it sounding like it was cut late on a weeknight with the bar still open.

The first two singles barely made a ripple. It took the fourth, "All I Wanna Do", to kick the door in. Crow wrote it with Bottrell, David Baerwald and Kevin Gilbert, building it out of "Fun", a poem by Wyn Cooper, and its sun-baked, beer-in-hand shrug carried it to number two on the Billboard Hot 100. The album followed it up to number three on the Billboard 200. "Leaving Las Vegas" brought the dusty, smoky side, "Strong Enough" stripped things down to a bare, aching plea, and "Can't Cry Anymore" rolled along with a bar-band strut, proof there was more going on here than one lucky break.

US sales had topped 4.5 million by January 2008, and in Britain it climbed to number eight and went double platinum. It was the opening move in a career that would bring Crow nine Grammy Awards and, in 2023, a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; her self-titled second album came next.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.