The music Web sites have been abuzz with the news that Sheryl Crow’s next full-length, still untitled release is a country album. Its new single, “Easy,” which she premiered on Jan. 23’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” marked the Missouri-bred superstar’s foray into the New Sheryl Crow Sound.

Which sounded just like the Old Sheryl Crow Sound - easy-strumming earnestness about life, relationships and whatnot, but with a healthy dollop of extra twang.

And if you’re a fan, like me, who’s planning to be front and center at her show at the Kravis Center on Monday, you don’t have to worry about some drastic, genre-shattering Bob Dylan Goes Electric moment. That’s because “Strong Enough,” “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Steve McQueen,” “Every Day Is A Winding Road” and a lot of the other stuff Crow’s released since her 1993 debut “Tuesday Night Music Club” could have played between Taylor Swift and Lady Antebellum songs without anyone raising an eyebrow.

Even the singer herself admitted to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that she’s “always had a pretty strong country influence in my music.” We kind of already knew that, but thanks for the clarification.

To some people, “country influence” means just slapping a singer in denim and boots, throwing some Dobro and a fiddle on an otherwise poppy tune and calling it a day. Indeed, if you listen to the pop versions of, say, some Shania Twain songs from the mid-1990s, you’ll find they’re just the country album versions stripped of all the Nashville-esque instruments, perhaps because some suit somewhere assumed that fiddles make would-be pop music buyers yowl in pain and run away clutching their tightly-closed wallets.

But there’s more to country - to any genre, really - than token instruments and a costume change. Current country star Darius Rucker has said that a lot of the pop songs from his Hootie and the Blowfish heyday were actually country songs (and since “Let Her Cry” is about a flaky, sad-on-the-inside girl who only tells you where she’s been when she’s had too much to drink, we should have known. Drinking’s a giveaway.)

Just like with Hootie, what makes Crow’s songs more than a little bit country, as much as they were rock and roll (and yes, I went there) is in their lyrical DNA. It’s the conjuring of journeys down lonely roads, or long nights confronting the cavalcade of missed chances and empty shot glasses that’s become your life. It’s hitting the road with reckless abandon, or hitting the depths of your own self-focused despair. Apparently drunken solo crying is very country, which means I have been country since the mid 1990s without even knowing it.

Distinctly American forms of music, like rock, gospel, country and folk, are all cousins, so it shouldn’t be a shocker that they casually veer into each other, no matter what iTunes tags it as. When Crow dueted with Kid Rock on “Picture,” which references country-esque themes of cheating, drinking the memory of one’s lover away, sad pictures, empty hotel sex and church, it was such a crossover hit that it was hard to tell which side was crossing over into what.

So if Crow sings those familiar hits at the Kravis and a spare fiddle or Dobro are folded into the proceedings, don’t be alarmed. It’s still the song you love. It’s just embracing the roots that were already there.