Sheryl Crow pulls a surprise (Eric Clapton) at SunFest

By Sean Piccoli | Sun-Sentinel.com

12:33 AM EDT, May 1, 2008

WEST PALM BEACH - Sheryl Crow had already endeared herself to concertgoers at Sunfest on Wednesday night, playing songs from her new album Detours as well as hits including Can't Cry Anymore and A Change Would Do You Good. But when she brought out Eric Clapton -- "a longtime friend of mine who I admire so deeply," she said -- she gave SunFest's opening night audience a moment it won't soon forget.

The annotated band played a lively cover of Stevie Wonder's Higher Ground, with Crow singing lead vocals and Clapton peeling off his trademark bluesy guitar licks. It might not go down as the best version ever played, but it was a genuine surprise, and a welcome pairing of talents who used to be sweethearts.

Crow reportedly wrote My Favorite Mistake, which she had performed earlier in the set, for the legendary rock musician and, of late, memoirist. Before the rumor mill cranks up again, Clapton does have other business in South Florida: He performs on Monday at Hard Rock Live in Hollywood. This was Clapton's first Sunfest appearance.

The rest of Crow's 90-minute set, before and after Clapton's walk-on, was a winning mix of familiar and new. Songs from the just-released CDDetours kept strong company with Crow's best known material, and combined rock, soul, country and blues in roughly the same measure.

Inevitably, the standbys such as All I Wanna Do and Everyday is a Winding Road drew the biggest cheers. But Crow made a case on Wednesday for Detours as more than just set decoration around the old favorites. It's her most complete and purposeful record since 1998's the Globe Sessions, and the nine-piece Crow band -- sort of a miniature rock 'n' soul orchestra -- only improved on it live. Several new songs came across with more warmth and ease than their immacuately, sometimes obsessively produced studio counterparts.

Out of Our Heads invited the audience to bob along to its Caribbean beat and help sing the chorus. Detours (the title track) felt like the recovery song it is, a meditation that gained in emotional power as it progressed by subtly adding voices and instruments. Drunk With The Thought of You, a Beatlesque acoustic waltz, was classic Crow, its vision of love forever perched halfway between bliss and ruin.

Crow, 46, joked that the new album had "a lot of crap on it," as in baggage. "I got engaged and then I got un-gaged," she said, referring to her short-lived romance with cyclist Lance Armstrong. "I got breast cancer and then I got cured. I adopted a baby boy, who's asleep on the bus."

Detours is also a distress signal about the state of America and the world. She performed one of the new album's most apocalyptic songs, Gasoline, a future shock fable, and then let it bleed artfully into a coda composed of the Rolling Stones Gimme Shelter.

The Stones' excerpt could have been a clue that a real-life British rock icon was about to show up. Crow, who also performed Cat Stevens' The First Cut Is the Deepest, didn't need to spring Clapton, or any celebrity, to go over well on Wednesday. But having him sit in didn't hurt. If anything, Clapton's turn on stage underlined how much respect Crow commands as a rocker with her own distinguished, enviable career and deep catalogue of songs.

Sean Piccoli can be reached at spiccoli@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4832.