Time & Perspective Quote by Sheryl Crow

Crow is doing two things at once: refusing the pop myth of overnight discovery while quietly indicting the gatekeepers who made “older” a prerequisite for a woman with her own pen. The line “I have been around for a long, long time” isn’t nostalgia; it’s résumé-as-defense, a preemptive answer to the industry’s favorite accusation against late-breaking artists, especially women: Why weren’t you here sooner? Her reply: I was. You just weren’t looking for me.

The subtext sharpens when she names the era “when women were not getting signed,” then adds the qualifier that really stings: “particularly if you were writing songs that were lyrically propelled.” That’s a polite way of describing a bias that still circulates in A&R rooms: women can be faces, not authors; voices, not architects. “Lyrically propelled” signals a kind of seriousness that, in certain commercial cycles, gets coded as unmarketable when it comes from a woman unless it’s packaged as confessional novelty or scrubbed into generic romance.

Context matters here. Crow emerged in the early-to-mid ’90s, when alternative rock and adult contemporary formats could reward craft, yet the machinery behind them often preferred women as interpreters rather than writers-producers with opinions. Her phrasing keeps the temperature calm, but the implication is hot: longevity wasn’t just artistic maturation; it was endurance. The intent is a corrective to career timelines that treat male persistence as grit and female persistence as a problem to be solved.