My Favorite Mistake
| "My Favorite Mistake" | ||||||||||
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| Single by Sheryl Crow | ||||||||||
| from the album The Globe Sessions | ||||||||||
| B-side | "In Need" "Carolina" "Subway Ride" "Crash and Burn" | |||||||||
| Released | September 15, 1998 | |||||||||
| Format | CD single | |||||||||
| Genre | Rock, blues rock | |||||||||
| Length | 3:53 | |||||||||
| Label | A&M | |||||||||
| Writer(s) | Sheryl Crow Jeff Trott |
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| Producer(s) | Sheryl Crow | |||||||||
| Sheryl Crow singles chronology | ||||||||||
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"My Favorite Mistake" is the first single from Sheryl Crow's third album The Globe Sessions. The song was written about a relationship with a man who proves to be unfaithful and is widely believed to have been written about Eric Clapton. Released in 1998, the single peaked at #20 becoming Crow's fifth Top 20 single in the USA, while reaching the top 5 in Canada. In the UK, it reached #9, her last Top 10 single in Britain.
The song was written by Crow and her regular collaborator Jeff Trott. The song is about a philandering ex-boyfriend, rumoured to be Eric Clapton. There have also been those who believed the lover in the song to have been based on Jakob Dylan. Crow, however, has refused to say who the song was about, telling Billboard Magazine on the release of her album, "Oh, there will be just so much speculation, and because of that there's great safety and protection in the fact that people will be guessing so many different people and I'm the only person who will ever really know. I'm really private about who I've had relationships with, and I don't talk about them in the press. I don't even really talk about them with the people around me." Crow compared "My Favorite Mistake" to "You're So Vain" by Carly Simon. However, she later claimed that she doesn't look at her relationship with Clapton as a mistake and verified that it was definitely not about him. As further corroboration, Crow introduces Clapton as "a really good friend of mine" in her 1999 performance in Central Park, later to be released as an album.
The songs on The Globe Sessions including "My Favorite Mistake" were written in the first person as opposed the narrative songs featured on her first two albums. Crow was having so much difficulty with the honesty of the lyrics on the album that she was considering cancelling the release of the record in June 1998 and cancelled an appearance at Lilith Fair in the summer of that year. However, eventually the release of the album was deferred for six weeks while she recorded some new songs with a subsequent delay in the release of the leadoff single.
The song was recorded at Globe Recording Studio in New York owned by Robert FitzSimons and Tracey Loggia. Despite the difficulties in recording the album, Crow told the BBC in 2005 that: "My favorite single is 'My Favorite Mistake'; it was a lot of fun to record and it's still a lot of fun to play."
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