Sheryl Crow has put together what some might consider the album of a lifetime.
There are 17 tracks on this album with some of the most incredible collaborators.
And it's called Threads. It is available now.
And so we've been talking to Sheryl about all the songs on this album
because obviously she can tell the stories better than anybody.
And we are up to Redemption Day.
And talk about a special song.
She is singing with the late Johnny Cash.
So Sheryl, tell me, how did this version of this song come to be?
So Redemption Day has a long story.
And it goes back to a trip I made to Bosnia with Hillary Clinton.
I played for the troops.
I'd never seen anything like a war-torn area in my life.
I'd only seen it on the evening news during early days or late days of Vietnam
when people were coming home.
On the evening news, wrapped in flags and caskets.
And that was my relationship to war.
And it was very ominous, but it wasn't everywhere.
It wasn't 24-hour news back then.
So it was a deep, disturbing relationship.
It was a deep relationship to me to see what war looked like in person.
So I came home and I wrote this song called Redemption Day.
Put it out on, I guess, my second record, which luckily had some hits on it.
And so people probably heard it because back then you bought an album
and you heard the album cuts.
Well, cut to many years later in 2003,
Johnny Cash recorded it right before he passed away.
And we had many conversations about the song.
And he loved the song and felt like it was really important for that moment.
And he wanted it to come out then.
And then he passed away.
And the song didn't actually come out for many years.
And so this song now has sort of reappeared
and has a whole new message for what's happening.
So I guess in the best case scenario, when you write a song,
you hope it's going to outlive everything.
It's going to be timeless.
It's going to have meaning for all the ages.
But I feel like it's really presented itself now as having found its moment
and having Johnny Cash on it, having his vocal on it,
his original vocal that he did in his cabin.
It just brings so much weight.
To the song and brings a seriousness and a depth to it
that I think kind of announces the song's moment
and brings a lot of meaning to what we're going through
and who we are at this moment in our evolution.
And if you haven't seen the video, it also is incredibly powerful.
It's available on YouTube now.
And this is Sheryl Crow and the late Johnny Cash
Redemption Day off her new album, Threads.