Sheryl Crow – Freedom Bus ft. Jesse Welles (2026)

This was going to be a six-song EP. One song changed that.

The routine at Sheryl Crow’s house in Nashville was lunch, then a song. She and Jeff Trott — her writing partner since the mid-nineties, the man she calls her musical husband — would get together, eat, and have something finished inside two hours. A demo, then home. They did it weekly, without a record in mind, for long enough that a pile accumulated. Eventually they went back through it and realised some of it needed to come out.

Keep watching: Sheryl Crow – All I Wanna Do

The plan was six songs and an EP. Freedom Bus made it seven and an album. Crow has been straightforward about why — it was the one she could not stop thinking about, the one that matched where she actually was, and it would not sit quietly at the back of a folder. Pick You Up arrives on October 9, 2026, her twelfth studio album, released on her own Old Green Barn Productions and recorded in the home studio of the same name.

The song is about disagreement. Not about winning one — about the possibility of having one without deciding the other person is beneath contempt. Crow’s framing when she announced it was that freedom in America was paid for by people who died for it, and that the way we now talk to each other ought to reflect that price. It is a plain argument, plainly made, and the record carries it in Americana rather than anything more decorated.

The verse she went looking for

The second voice belongs to Jesse Welles, and Crow got him the way a fan would. She sent the song to producer Mike Elizondo for an opinion, and Elizondo mentioned he happened to be in the studio with Welles at that moment. Crow asked him to play it and see whether Welles might take a verse. He did.

Welles is from Ozark, Arkansas, picked up a guitar at eleven, and spent most of a decade in bands that did not quite work — a Nashville deal, an album produced by Dave Cobb in 2018, then getting dropped and going home. He had more or less stopped. After his father survived a heart attack he started again, and what came out was different: short topical songs filmed on a phone, alone with an acoustic guitar in a field or under power lines, posted within days of whatever they were about.

That approach found an enormous audience remarkably quickly. He has released records at a pace that would have been unremarkable in 1965 and looks reckless now, took the John Prine Songwriting Fellowship at Newport in 2025, has been joined on stage by Joan Baez and John Fogerty, and arrived at the 2026 Grammy Awards with four nominations. The Woody Guthrie comparison follows him everywhere and he has not spent much energy discouraging it.

The rest of the record

Nothing else on Pick You Up works this way. Crow has described the other six as introspective rather than political — a reckoning with being a musician a long way into a career, written by someone who tells her children she used to be a rock star and finds the tense funny. Freight Train, Perfect, Pick You Up, Flat Earth, I’ve Got Your Number and Heaven Help Us fill it out.

Crow spends the end of summer on Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival dates and opens for Tedeschi Trucks Band in September. Which is a fair indication of where the record sits — a nine-time Grammy winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee making a small, self-released, seven-song album at home with the same guitarist she has been writing with for thirty years, and handing a verse of it to someone who was posting songs from a field two years ago.