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A Real Pair

Talking with Sheryl Crow and Fiona Apple -- Lilith Fair mainstays discuss performing covers, New Orleans, and making videos

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By Leah Greenblatt

Leah Greenblatt

At EW's cover photo shoot, we sat down with Fiona Apple and Sheryl Crow to talk about nasty rumors, sexy videos, and (why not?) Prince.

So I brought the 1997 EW cover that you guys were on together.

Fiona Apple: [To Crow] Do you remember how after we did that, somebody from, like, New York magazine made up some story where I locked myself in the bathroom? And the bathroom didn't actually have a lock. It was a swinging door. You wrote [an unpublished] letter [to the magazine] in my defense.
Sheryl Crow: Well, the whole thing was so ridiculous. To pit women against other women, it's such a cliché.
FA: When the thing came out, it said ''Fiona Apple: Rotten to the Corps,'' and my grandmother was in town, and she was like, ''Did you really do that?'' And then we found out about you writing the letter and everybody in my house was like, ''Yay, Sheryl Crow!'' [Laughs]
SC: I'm the queen of letter writing. It's just something I can't help. My parents raised me that you always wrote letters.

You guys actually both had pretty musical moms. Fiona, your mom was in musical theater, and Sheryl, your mom was a big-band singer?

SC: Yeah, my family was really musical. But the only reason I taught myself to play guitar was because I wanted to be a rocker. [To Fiona]You're great at it, but [when I was younger] I never felt I could lead the band sitting at the piano. And now of course I'd much rather be playing the piano.
FA: Well, I'm jealous of anybody who plays guitar, because then you can be mobile with it, you can play it while you're walking around the house or on the phone. And with the piano, you have to go to the same little wall, and I think that it gets me so that I don't practice a lot, because I don't want to go to the same corner all the time.
SC: Well, there was a moment in the '80s when you could strap on your keyboard.

The keytar!

SC: Yes, that was a noble point for musicians across the world. [Laughs]

I'm guessing you guys are getting ready to make videos for your first singles. On MTV, the standard is usually just a lot of very young girls in, like, booty shorts. Is it hard to make a video and be sexy, but not too sexy?

FA: There's nothing really wrong with being dressed in skimpy clothing. But I just wouldn't want to do it. Well, I did it once [in the ''Criminal'' video]. [Laughs] But I wouldn't be able to concentrate on what I was doing. I'd be too worried about what I looked like and what angle everybody was getting.
SC: Fiona and I are lucky. We fall into the singer-songwriter category, so we can play around with the image thing and enter into that world that's sort of make-believe. But thank God we don't have to rely on it. [Laughs]

You've both done some really good covers [Crow's ''First Cut Is the Deepest,'' Apple's ''Across the Universe,'' among others]. Have you ever heard yourself being covered?

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