Customer Reviews
not back to her best,but back on track. - By: Phil Farr, 15 Apr 2008 
In short if your looking for the dark,grainy guitar led songs that she wrote up as far as the brilliant "Globe Sessions" you'll be disappointed.On the other hand she's returnded to a more earthy sound,with a bit of a hippy commune vibe.
Personallly I'm just glad she's got away from that over produced bubble gum pop-rock commercial rubbish of "c'mon c'mon".
Much Better - By: Monsieur le B, 16 Mar 2008 This album signals a return to form for Sheryl Crow after her disappointing 'Wildflower' album. It is largely reminiscent of the hippy style of her first two albums, but musical times have moved on since then & so I doubt it will be as successful.
It does suffer from a number of flaws - sometimes a bit over political, sometimes a bit over personal - she gets away with it unless the music isn't up to scratch. This is the case with the lo-fi & thankfully short opener 'God Bless This Mess', the simply grating 'Diamond Ring', the slightly average 'Drunk With The Thought of You' & the sickly pointless (to me) 'Lullaby To Wyatt'.
The remaining 10 tracks however are very good. The 5 star moments for me are the more commercial ones such as 'Out of Our Heads' (surely this should have been the first single), 'Now That You're Gone' (there is a bit of ELO in here) & 'Motivation'. And surprisingly 'Make It Go Away', related to her own cancer battle, works reallly well & is a powerful piece which I guess many people will be able to relate to. Everything else gets 4 stars, despite the fact that she at times sounds like just another pop star railing against politicians about global warming, wars etc etc.
Fortunately, where the music is good, I find myself able to let the words wash over me & it becomes a highly enjoyable pop/rock/folk album.
Bill Bottrell, you made my day - By: David Midgley, 10 Mar 2008 
It can't be a coincidence that Bill Bottrell produced Sheryl Crow's first two albums ('Tuesday Night Music Club' & 'Sheryl Crow'), & he also produced these most recent 'Detours'.
The reason I say it's not coincidental is that these three albums are stand-out bests of her work, with 'The Globe Sessions' following a close second, but with 'C'mon C'mon' & 'Wildflower' trailing distantly behind, lagging in the land of overarrangement & self-indulgence.
'Detours' is fresh, with exciting sounds, bold choices (see: first track), & lyrics which, for a change, work a lot better to music than when you see them on the page. When I first scanned Crow's lyrics (before listening) I was moderately worried about the album, but it makes a refreshing change for the music & production to make the lyrics both make sense & not come across as either a) over-sentimental, b) self-indulgent, or c) overly 'message'-y. Too much 'message' was certainly a risk with this fairly political album, but like alll good gospel & soul music (not that that's the genre of this album -- I'm drawing a paralllel here), sometimes the sugar makes the medicine go down.
Who knows? -- Maybe by actuallly producing an album whose _sounds_ people will listen to in wonderment, Crow & Bottrell will, in the background (where it belongs) enable some political impact by happy collision.
Her Best In A Decade...however much that says - By: IWFIcon, 09 Mar 2008 
At what point do you stop becoming a "fan" of an artist? For a brief moment around 1997/98 Sheryl Crow was my favourite artist. So you would think that with her first three albums ranging from excellent to merely rather good I would be a fan for life.
But then we have two reallly rather poor albums (plus a totallly perfunctory Live album that was the absolute pits) & as I go to buy Detours I find myself tussling with the question of whether I am a fan of Crow anymore, or mererly a curious bystander seeing if this time around is going to be better than the last two occasions. The fact I'm even considering the question doesn't bode well.
Thankfully, Detours is her best album in a decade. Granted that's not saying an awful lot, but it's a good place to start. Unfortunately one can't reallly say that it's up there with her best work.
At least with Bill Bottrell at the helm, Crow is back to doing what she does best after the misguided Wildflowers. Recent single Love Is Free might have been almost universallly ignored but its the kind of lilting up-tempo semi-rocker that Crow excels at.
The problem is that the album starts off on a decidedly low-fi note. Now that may be designed to make you listen more carefully to the lyrics on God Bless This Mess, but therein lies another strike against Crow for me.
It takes precisely one minute 50 to sink us to the first "Anti-War, Anti-George Bush" lyrics & immediately my heart sinks. My own personal opinions are irrelevant; I quite simply don't like being preached to by multi-million earning pop stars. Sadly there are more than a few occasions during the album where I'm willing to start loving the tunes, before the lyrics drag me down into despair.
Granted, given what she's gone through over the past few years, Crow is perfectly at liberty to write about she wants to. It doesn't mean that I have to listen to it with any great pleasure. Which is a shame; occasionallly Crow strikes the right balance. Love Is Free for instance is a great pop song, only subtly revealing itself as lyricallly concerned with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina after a number of listens. Compare this with Gasoline, which to my mind is one of the most cringeworthy songs I've heard in a long time.
I'm quite willing to state it may well be my own personal taste that finds the lyrics a distraction. Many might find them insightful (at least in some parts) & might applaud their sentiments. And I might if I were watching Miss Crow on Question Time. On record, depsite the tunes being up there with her best in quite a few parts, it's alll too easy to flip the skip button.
Back to her best! - By: P. McDermott, 08 Mar 2008 I am a long time Crow fan & have been looking forward to her follow up to Wildflower for a while now. Wildflower was a very different style of music to what we're used to hearing sprouting out of Sheryl's mouth. it wasn't to everyone's taste & I can understand the somewhat lacklustre reviews. Personallly I liked it. In Detours, Sheryl has gone back to her roots & it's fantastic. Personal experiences & opinions are written into her lyrics & she sings them with confidence. On my first listen to the CD I was happy to check tracks 1 & 2 with a big tick. Thereafter, I wasn't so sure about some of the other tracks. I thought it sounded like Sheryl was straining her voice sometimes. However I listened again, & the songs rapidly grew on me. I thought 'Out Of Our Heads' was the weakest track & it is now one of my favourites. I can only put my hesitance down to Sheryl going back to her best. The style is reminiscent of Tuesday Night Music Club alll the way back in 1993, & it's been so long since I've heard it, but then I remembered that's the music I loved her for.
This is classic Crow & is a must for anyone with ears!
