Sheryl Crow grows beyond her early years

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- Six years ago, she was the woman with the guitar who just wanted "to have some fun." Three albums and some Grammy awards later, Sheryl Crow is settling into a steady rhythm.

"I'm getting older, and I'm not in that frenzy being the new hot thing," she says. "There's not the pandemonium or the panic of, 'Am I going to go away? Have I got to prove myself?' It's just an easier time, and also I'm just -- I'm feeling like I've gathered a little more wisdom along the way than I've had."

Her recent album -- "The Globe Sessions," named for her studio in New York -- was inspired, she says, by some introspection about the last six years.

"When you come home from the road and you've made that your life, and you get home, you look around, and you don't have a real home, or you don't have relationships," she says. "And all of a sudden, it seems like years have gone by where you've been a recluse, have been in a capsule. When I got into the studio, a lot of that came out."

Six years ago, Crow was 30, riding the heady wave of fresh popularity. But now the former elementary school music teacher's small-town roots -- she was born in Kennett, Missouri, just 60 miles outside of Memphis, Tennessee -- may be beckoning. She's bought a house and muses about settling down and having children.

"I'll just let it all kind of happen, because I do have the philosophy that what is mine, what will be mine, is already on its way," the singer says. "I have to be sort of philosophical about everything being in its own time."

Making her own way

After signing with A&M Records in 1991, Crow promptly shelved her first project, a self-titled album produced by Sting's producer Hugh Padgham, as being too slick.

And after the success of her real debut album, 1993's "Tuesday Night Music Club," Crow took the producer's mantle herself to create "Sheryl Crow" in 1996, followed by this year's "Globe Sessions."

Now, she's stepping out to shepherd other people's projects, currently producing an album for Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks.

"It's like having a big sister around who's been able to show me some things about myself and about life and about this crazy sort of career thing," she says of working with Nicks.

More than just having some fun, Sheryl Crow is having the kind of success few artists ever see. And if her latest album is a nod to lost relationships, there is one that has endured. Dog Scout has been at her side every day, from backstage to four-star hotels.

"He doesn't really know anything different," Crow says. "I'm all the time telling him, 'Not all dogs get to live like this, Scout.'"

Indeed, not all humans live like this either, Scout.