Things I bought and wish I hadn't part 2

I got The Very Best of Sheryl Crow for Babette, because we fancied that Ms Crow was the kind of person, a Greatest Hits is all you'd ever want.

Way back in the mists of I was an early adopter of Tuesday Night Music Club, which I liked for a while and then stopped playing, in the way of these things. And I remember standing in a record department trying the follow up a couple of years later, and deciding that it was far too rockist for my tastes. Should have been warned. A self-titled follow-up is a sure sign of a career re-launch and personal reinvention, as we've previously discussed.

These years later I found it strange to listen again, especially to the ones I once liked, and... just not like it very much at all. Her signature sound, for the most part, is a very dry, very compressed vocal. I have previously enjoyed this modern trend to the ultra-dry vocal, especially on the debut album of Carolyn Dawn Johnson.

When she sings, "If I'm not over you/ By the time I get to Georgia/ Then I guess I'll be/ Alabama bound," it's as if she's right next to your ear, perhaps in the passenger seat of your car.

But on Sheryl Crow, in spite of the fact that this has been her sound since the beginning, it just sounds reedy and thin, like a nervous karaoke virgin not drunk enough not to care.

This comes across most strongly on Crow's duet with Kid Rock, "Picture," which starts out like a bog-standard country song, with his pleasant-enough voice singing the first verse and chorus. But where on a proper country duet the female vocal would come in... a belter like Martina or Trisha perhaps, you suddenly get this pathetic, thin not-up-to-the-job, Crow's voice, and it's like you walked into another song.

Backing singers, in my experience, are generally pretty good at what they do, so how Crow ever got work as one, I'll never know. Her voice actually sounds its best when surrounded by supporting layers of harmony, so perhaps people just couldn't tell.

So it seems an act self-loathing career destruction for her to attempt to sing something even a little bit Country. The song might be good, but the singer ain't up to it. You can almost hear the Pop Idol judges saying, "That's a very difficult song to sing, and a bad choice for you."

And talking of songs, is there any more pretentious line in rock than, "She was born in November 1963/ The day Aldous Huxley died..."? Nobody should be allowed to get away with that kind of tripe.