POP MUSIC REVIEW : There’s Nothing Much to Crow About at the Greek

If all she wants to do is have some fun, Sheryl Crow can get by on shows like the one she gave on Wednesday at the Greek Theatre. If she wants to live up to the commercial success and the truckload of Grammys generated by her debut album, the singer-songwriter needs to raise the stakes a bit.

Crow’s lyrics of restlessness and rootlessness are a cut above, but at the Greek their force and nuance were drained by musical tepidity and vocal limitations--Crow’s conversational phrasing sometimes suits the train-of-thought form in which she writes, but her voice thins out drastically when she gives it full power.

The catchy but faceless blend of folk-pop, R&B; and Stones-ish rock played by Crow and her four musicians failed to capture her songs’ most telling qualities--the desperation for reassurance, the tensions, frustrations and hopefulness of life in a zone between security and uncertainty.

Her music is a mainstream vehicle with identifying quirks tacked on rather than welling from the core--bohemian trim on a conventional model. The result is frequently both mannered and timid.

“All I Wanna Do,” with its endorsement of a seedy bar as a fine place to be in the morning, is moderately subversive as pop hits go, but not enough so to be truly threatening. The strongest sign that Crow might have an inclination to grow was an acoustic version of the song that she recited, poetry-reading style. Here, she encouraged a persona to arise from the music, and discovered a vein of uncertainty that the regular rendition later in the show glossed over.

Crow summoned a similar intensity on “What I Can Do for You,” a song whose straightforward theme of sexual harassment gives it a clear focus. The rest of the time, she was as adrift in her art as her characters are in their lives.