Sheryl Crow's Threads features two dozen fellow stars, but there's one she couldn't sew up

The Valory Music Co.

Sheryl Crow‘s new album, Threads, features two dozen special guests, from Maren Morris, Chris Stapleton, and Vince Gill, to Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris and Kris Kristofferson. However, Sheryl says there is one legendary artist she tried to get on the record, but she couldn’t pull it off.

“The one collaboration that didn’t and couldn’t happen was with Elton [John],” Sheryl told reporters in Nashville recently. “He and I have collaborated through the years but never recorded. He’s on his final tour and, y’know, when he’s off, he wants to be home. And I totally understood that.”

“But really everything else, I mean, it just kind of came together,” Sheryl says, explaining that scheduling the guests wasn’t an issue because she worked on Threads on her own schedule, over several years.

“We weren’t on any kind of time frame. We didn’t have a record label saying, ‘Hey, we need a record!'” she explains. “We just were kind of like kids in a candy shop and we kind of wrote the rules as we went.”

Sheryl was able to land all those big names on her album because over the years, she’s become friends with them all — which means she’s got one heck of a contact list on her phone.

“I guess in some ways, those numbers represent life experiences and it is humbling,” she told reporters. “I am awestruck when I look in there and I see Elton John or Johnny Cash…it’s overwhelming.”

Unfortunately, Sheryl’s two young sons aren’t so impressed with mom’s famous pals. Asked which artist she could have worked with who would have impressed her boys, she laughs.

“Lil Nas X, unequivocally!” she says, referring to the record-breaking “Old Town Road” rapper. “That would have been the be all, end all.”