Photo: Rick Diamond
On May 21, 2002, Willie Nelson and Sheryl Crow tape an installment of “CMT Crossroads” on the Sony Pictures lot in Los Angeles. Here is the entire show, as it aired on June 7, 2002.
Enjoy the entire show that someone uploaded to youtube.
Their friendship has grown since their first meeting. Crow, raised in a musical household in Missouri, reveres Nelson as the “king of phrasing” and “the voice that was the soundtrack to my childhood.” Nelson regards Crow as a worthy musical colleague, an inheritor of his musical “outlaw” spirit and a fit audience for his dirty jokes.
Nelson played an electric guitar throughout the night instead of his battered classical acoustic, dubbed “Trigger.” (Crow said her instruments have no names, but she might refer to them as “my little money makers.”) “My guitar,” Nelson explained, “is on the way to Amsterdam [for a European tour]. I am following soon behind.”
The singers each took care to match the other’s vocal phrasing, casting sidelong glances at each other throughout their performance. Of “Let It Be Me,” Nelson proclaimed the duo “happy to be resurrecting a great song.” He toyed with the familiar phrasing and seemed to challenge Crow to do the same. “It wasn’t perfect, but it was tasty,” she said after the first take.
Songs:
01. Jackson
02. Abilene
03. City of New Orleans
04. Let It Be Me
05. It’s So Easy
06. You Remain
07. Crazy
08. Every Day Is A Winding Road