Sheryl Crow

Sheryl Crow (born 1962) broke through with 1993’s Tuesday Night Music Club and its hit “All I Wanna Do,” going on to nine Grammys and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023. That same year, AI barged into her creative life.

An album born of AI dread

The trigger was a demo a songwriter played her featuring John Mayer’s voice — except Mayer had never sung it; his voice had been cloned by AI for a few dollars. Crow said she could not tell the difference “in any way, shape or form.” Having declared she would never make another full album, she found herself writing one anyway: “I was terrified, and where do I go when I’m terrified? I go to my studio.” The result was Evolution (2024), whose title track — with a searing Tom Morello solo — asks what AI means for human expression.

She has been equally blunt about AI resurrection of the dead. She called the Beatles’ use of AI to recover John Lennon’s voice unsettling, and in June 2024 tore into Drake for the AI-generated Tupac Shakur verse on “Taylor Made Freestyle”: “It’s hateful. It is antithetical to the life force that exists in all of us.” As she put it, “You cannot bring people back from the dead and believe that they would stand for that” — noting that even after the Shakur estate forced the track down, the fake was “already done” and loose in the world.

Crow frames the stakes as spiritual rather than economic — art as soul versus synthesis — and has kept pressing the theme in interviews, warning that voice cloning is a “slippery slope” the industry has barely begun to reckon with.