I'm sure Sheryl Crow is crazy about a lot of things, but in a recent interview in Parade magazine, she gets pretty specific about her loves right now. For starters, her animals.

"I have 11 horses, two dogs, chickens, donkeys and two Texas longhorn cows," she said. "I want to instill in my sons a love of nature. We're all renting Earth, so we have to take care of it."

(That last thought would make a great country song, by the way.)

Crow says she even thought about becoming a veterinarian if she had not been drawn to music.

"I think I'd be a veterinarian because I'm animal crazy," she said.

Crow's other love is the music of other artists she admires. She says she'd like to work with John Mayer ("He's so talented") and Emmylou Harris again ("She's my favorite person to sing with"). She also loves that Feels Like Home, her new country album, allowed her to tell her own kinds of personal stories.

"I've always written songs with stories, but now they're stronger and in the first person," she said.

Of "Waterproof Mascara," a song she wrote with Brad Paisley, she told Parade it was inspired by her own life as a single mom. I hope she didn't mean that literally because the song is so sad. It's about a boy asking his mom questions and wondering why he doesn't have a daddy, so she wears waterproof mascara so that he won't see her cry.

One of the lines is, "Thank God they make waterproof mascara 'cause it won't run like his daddy did." But what she was trying to do with that track was write a song about the realities of what it's like to be a woman today, the way old-school girl singers did in their prime.

"I wanted to make a record about what it's like to be a woman right now, like Tammy [Wynette] and Loretta [Lynn] did," Crow said. "So writing about being a single working mom was important to me."

Crow's new album has another mommy song that's even sadder, called "Stay at Home Mother" with lyrics like, "My little girl grew up while I was too busy to see." Don't listen to it if you're working late and missing a school play or basketball tournament or teenage heartbreak.