The Meaning Behind “Strong Enough” by Sheryl Crow

Sheryl Crow’s debut, Tuesday Night Music Club, adopted its name from a Pasadena-based collective of musicians gathering to jam and write songs. She was the only woman in the room, and together, they co-wrote what became a multi-platinum album.

Alongside hits like “All I Wanna Do” and “Leaving Las Vegas” is “Strong Enough,” a tender folk song asking a simple yet complex question: Are you strong enough to be my man?

The professional fallout from the success of Crow’s debut felt as messy as a damaged personal relationship. Her co-writers claimed she took credit for their contributions, and as her career skyrocketed, friends and colleagues disappeared.

But it’s the kind of fits-and-starts path Crow experienced chasing a dream from Kennett, Missouri. She left her job as an elementary school music teacher and headed for California, where she landed gigs singing background vocals for Michael Jackson and Don Henley. She even documented, as an aside, sexual harassment by Michael Jackson’s manager, Frank DiLeo, in “The Na-Na Song.”

Tuesday Night Music Club wasn’t her first album. Crow recorded a slick debut album she begged her record label not to release. Then she followed Tuesday Night Music Club with a self-titled and self-produced monster hit, quieting the whispers of whether she had the goods to make it without the club’s men.

Lie to Me

Crow wrote “Strong Enough” with Tuesday’s club members Bill Bottrell, Kevin Gilbert, Brian MacLeod, David Ricketts, and David Baerwald. The song is about her frustration with a failing relationship. Though frustrated, she doesn’t want it to end, and she’ll accept a lie out of desperation.

Lie to me

I promise I’ll believe

Lie to me

But please don’t leave, don’t leave

Humans are good at tricking themselves with fiction. Repeat a lie enough times, and it becomes believable even to the person creating the deception. People fear being alone, and lies work like Band-Aids because sometimes wounds heal underneath the dressing.

Nothing’s true, and nothing’s right

So let me be alone tonight

’Cause you can’t change the way I am

Are you strong enough to be my man?

Relationships fail when a couple no longer speaks with one another, resulting in a pseudo-conversation where people talk at or past each other. Crow sings that nothing’s true and nothing’s right and speaks to the dishonesty that overwhelms a conversation when both sides become defensive.

I have a face I cannot show

I make the rules up as I go

Just try and love me if you can

Are you strong enough to be my man?

It’s easier to know when a relationship is wrong than to admit it’s over. Toxicity festers like a bug invasion, leaving behind bitterness and, ultimately, regret. Selfishly, the regret may have more to do with wasted time than the broken affair.

Sweet Darkness

There’s irony is how sweet the darkness sounds. Crow possesses the same magical gift as Bruce Springsteen: the ability to deliver the darkness under the guise of light or hope. She has an earthy voice, singing what sounds like a lullaby even though she’s in a hopeless situation.

This period predates Crow’s move to Nashville, but the hook is classic country. Like her other hits, “Strong Enough” sounds like a tune already in the Great American Songbook. Regarding the earthiness of her voice, Crow’s songs sound like found fossils. Like they were always there, waiting for discovery.

Dancing Barefoot

In the music video, Crow sings alone in a minimally furnished loft. It looks like her partner has finally moved out. There’s a television on the ground like whoever left did it in a hurry. She paces frantically, stepping across her bed, alternately trying to understand what happened and stomping out the past to make way for the future.

She’s barefoot in the video, and Patti Smith’s “Dancing Barefoot” comes to mind. In Smith’s song, she sees God in her man, in a space where the divine meets the earth. But in Crow’s song, the magic is gone, and the revealed trick of how’d-he-do-it is far less attractive.

The reality of an unfixable relationship sets in while Crow’s tears of rage finally hit the floor. But her catharsis is as accurate as the ending. Smith sang at the horizon point, and Crow’s future is on the other side.

It’s unknown who the man is or was in “Strong Enough,” but she already knows the answer to the primary question. She wouldn’t have had to write the song in the first place if he’d said yes.

(Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for The Environmental Media Association)