Either Sheryl Crow read that old report that we’d all be having sex with robots by 2025, or she’s checked the news pretty much any day in the past year. Whatever it is, she’s understandably pretty freaked out about the prospect of being replaced by a robot. “Punch the clock and walk away / While you still have a job and while that job still pays… You’re gonna wake up someday / To a robot that’s in your place / Like all the predictions say,” she warns in her new single, “The New Normal.”
Luckily, Crow is still punching the clock. “The New Normal” is addressed to “the leader of the free world.” (She didn’t invoke his name, so this writer won’t either.) “Is it science fiction or prediction wrapped in George Orwell? / If the news is fake and fear is hate and nothing’s immoral / To the leader of the free world, then welcome to the new normal,” she sings in the song’s chorus. The first cut may have been the deepest, but the hits just keep coming.
For Crow, the song represents fears greater than just the robot takeover. “What’s happening all around us is so unbelievably bizarre, that my fear is we will truly begin to feel like this is normal,” she wrote of the song in an Instagram caption. “And that’s what terrifies me.”
Crow has been staunchly anti-AI for a while now. Last year, she called the technology “hateful” and “antithetical to the life force that exists in all of us,” in response to Drake creating a zombified version of Tupac’s voice for “Taylor Made Freestyle.” “You cannot bring people back from the dead and believe that they would stand for that,” she added. Previously, she also called AI a “slippery slope” and “a betrayal” that “goes against everything humanity is based on” in an interview with BBC.
At least there are still some good things happening for Crow within the new normal. In her Instagram post, Crow also praised her band, The Real Lowdown, writing, “I am so blessed to have the band that I have. For years, we have jammed up such cool stuff during sound checks that we decide we go in and start recording as a band. Can’t wait for everyone to hear the new stuff we are doing.” Our future robot overlords may be waiting, but at least we get some cool human stuff in the interim.