The awarding-winning success of Sheryl Crow's first album, "Tuesday Night Music Club," made it a tough act to follow. When Crow's eponymous second album was about to be released in 1996, she faced an additional obstacle. One of the tracks, "Love Is a Good Thing," which Crow co-wrote with Tad Wadhams, included the lyric: "Watch our children as they kill each other/ with a gun they bought at the Wal-Mart discount stores" (via Los Angeles Times). Wal-Mart took offense and decided to ban the album from its stores, potentially causing Crow to lose 400,000 sales.
While record execs denied that Wal-Mart asked Crow to change the lyric, she remembered a suggestion that she change the reference to another retailer, like Kmart, to avoid the album being censored. Besides losing profits with fewer sales, Crow was also disappointed because the ban would prevent fans in her hometown from purchasing her album locally. However, she was determined to uphold her personal integrity and take the risk.
While Crow doesn't know how many sales she lost, "Sheryl Crow" became a multi-platinum, Grammy-award-winning album. Financial success aside, Crow sees this incident as a positive experience. "It's not the 50,000 or the 50 million records that you've sold," she explained to MSNBC. "It's the times that you stood up for something that you will forever feel proud of more than anything else."
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