“All I Wanna Do” by Sheryl Crow

"All I Wanna Do" is the song that turned Sheryl Crow from a promising debut artist into a star: A&M put it out in July 1994 as a single from Tuesday Night Music Club, her first album, released the year before. Crow wrote the music with David Baerwald, Bill Bottrell and Kevin Gilbert, and the words came, reworked, from a 1987 poem by Wyn Cooper called "Fun".

Bottrell produced it, with Blair Lamb engineering, and the record has the easy, slightly sunburnt looseness of musicians who had nowhere better to be: a lazy, loping groove, with Crow sounding like she has all afternoon and no intention of hurrying the chorus. It's a shrug set to music, and that was the charm.

The numbers backed it up. Late in 1994 it spent six straight weeks stuck behind the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100, at two, topped the Adult Contemporary chart, and went to number one in Canada and Australia. At the 1995 Grammys it won Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and was up for Song of the Year, and the video, directed by David Hogan and Roman Coppola, took an award at the 1994 Billboard Music Video Awards. It remains her biggest US hit.

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