All she wants to do is have some impact

Not much scares Sheryl Crow these days.

“The last three years were a real awakening for me,” Crow says during a stop to promote “Detours,” her first album since 2005. “I’ve felt a fearlessness I’ve never felt before.”

That bravery is the product of a one-two punch – her breast cancer diagnosis only days after the collapse of her engagement to bike champion Lance Armstrong.

Last spring, she poured out her feelings in a studio built at her new Tennessee farm. With newly adopted baby Wyatt keeping her company, she knocked out 24 songs in 40 days.

The result is a CD that veers from the intensely personal to the unabashedly political, from cancer and love lost to Hurricane Katrina and Iraq.

Fans looking for specific references to Armstrong are out of luck, though the song “Diamond Ring” has the lyric: “Diamonds may be sweet/But to me they just bring on cold feet.”

“I get to talk about it on my own terms, hopefully in a poetic way, in a way that’s inspired from the spirit,” Crow says. “The gory details aren’t as interesting anyway.”

What stands out is a more strident political stance taken by a songwriter more known for such good-time hits as “Soak Up the Sun,” “All I Wanna Do” and “If It Makes You Happy.”

“A lot of people in my age group I think are talking about the same thing – how in the last seven years, we as a nation have been taken on a grand tour away from what this nation was meant to be,” she says.

Part of the urgency, she says, comes from worrying about Wyatt and what kind of future he’ll have. He gets his own song on the new CD – “Lullaby for Wyatt.”

Crow, who turned 46 on Monday, looks easily two decades younger than her age.

A product of Kennett, Mo., she lived for years as a backup singer and later star in Los Angeles and later in Texas, with Armstrong. Now she’s made a home in a 154-acre farm outside Nashville.

Her current distance from the tabloids – and, of course, the new baby – have helped clear her head. Wyatt is 9 months old and almost walking.

“I’m really, really happy with where I am in my life,” she says. “And certainly, after having gone through breast cancer, I feel like I have a clear overview.

“I feel that whole experience really brought me back to remembering who it is I’ve always wanted to be.”

Whether or not her fans snap up the new CD in droves doesn’t necessarily worry her.

“Now I’m past the point of really caring,” she says. “My objective is that I just want to write about the things that really matter to me and that’s how I wound up with a record like this. If it gets played, that’s fantastic.”

The birthday bunch

Actor Hal Holbrook is 83. Actress Mary Ann Mobley is 69. Actress Rene Russo is 54. Actor Richard Karn (“Home Improvement”) is 52. Actor Lou Diamond Phillips is 46. Comedian Larry the Cable Guy is 45. Actor Dominic Purcell (“Prison Break”) is 38. Actress Denise Richards is 37. Musician Billie Joe Armstrong (Green Day) is 36. Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt is 27.