Hitsville doesn’t understand Sheryl Crow; she’s one of those vacuous, meaningless performers who fills up some cosmic space in the pop-culture miasma for some period of time, to no apparent purpose. She grins for interviewers; sells her songs to whatever vacuous, meaningless product that wants them; and poses for the photogs with a come-hither pout and bare midriff when she’s got something to promote. In all of these ways she’s an agreeable, efficient product, the musical equivalent of “new Tide with enzymatic cleaning power.”

Crow haters savor the one clink in her facade; a now-infamous appearance on Letterman way back when in which she nattered on about having written the song “Leaving Las Vegas.” In fact, it was largely the work of her “Tuesday Night Music Club” collaborators; the title was taken from a book by a friend of theirs, John O’Brien. (It was being filmed at the time.) He was troubled, and committed suicide a few weeks later.

The moment isn’t about Crow being a liar, exactly. But it does capture an artist with some integrity issues. Here’s how one of her friends interpreted it:

“The moment sort of summed up the entire two years, before Sheryl was huge, before the album started selling. It summed up her and everybody’s motivation at the company to pass her off as the singer-songwriter who did this work.”

That friend, Bill Bottrell, is now back collaborating with Crow, whose studio album sales have been falling steadily her last few releases. In recapturing that early time, an NYT feature today promoting her new album refers vaguely only to “squabbling over who deserved what”—and rather ungenerously allows Crow to smack the folks who gave her her start one more time:

“In my diplomacy, I never really told the truth about it, which is that the people who worked on the record are who they were before I ever met them. They were discontented and bitter.”

Charming. (The other “Tuesday Night Music Club” folks don’t get to respond.) The article also contains this delicious Crow quote, which you can imagine her uttering through slightly gritted teeth:

“There’s something really fantastic about knowing I’m not going to get played at radio,” she said. “I’m not interested in making the kind of music that would compete in that genre, so it’s great. It leaves me to my own devices without the framework of a pop commercial hit.”