Sheryl Crow's breakthrough hit All I Wanna Do
, from her 1993 debut album Tuesday Night Music Club
, is based on a poem called Fun by Wyn Cooper, from his 1987 collection The Country of Here Below
. Crow, her producer Bill Bottrell, and their collaborators struggled for months with the song, which at one point was called "I Still Love You." Then Bottrell came across Cooper's collection at a used bookstore near the recording studio. "Way at the end, I pulled out a Wyn Cooper poem which provided all the verses, and Sheryl sang or spoke that right into the mic, and I made a chorus out of the line about just wanting to have fun," Bottrell says in Richard Buskin's 2003 book Sheryl Crow: No Fool to This Game
. Buskin also quotes Cooper: "I wrote the poem in Salt Lake City in 1984. It was based loosely on a bar there called The Twilight Lounge, although that didn't look out onto a car wash. It was mostly made up, utilizing a line that a friend of mine had said to me the night before; 'All I want to do is have a little fun before I die.' The next day I wrote that line down and kept going, and I wrote the whole poem in just a couple of hours." Cooper earned royalties from the song and its popularity helped keep his book in print. He even recited the poem on stage at a few of Crow's concerts.
