On any given summer day, all Bendites want to do is have some fun and soak up the sun.

It’s no accident that statement references three Sheryl Crow hit song titles (a love of puns notwithstanding). After years touring as a backing vocalist and working as a session singer, the Missouri-born songwriter broke through mainstream radio with 1994’s “All I Wanna Do,” a laid-back anthem that set the template for what most mainstream audiences still think of when they think of Crow — insistent rhythms, bright guitar chords and melodies that practically drip sunshine.

Crow has performed at Les Schwab Amphitheater twice before. She will return to the venue on Wednesday, and judging from the way she gushed about the area during a recent chat with GO! Magazine, it’s not just her music that is simpatico with Central Oregon.

“This is the part of our country that we absolutely love and can’t wait to get to,” she said from a tour stop in Salt Lake City, following a marathon 14-hour bus ride from Calgary, Canada. “My kids and I are outdoors freaks — we just love hiking and camping and doing all the outdoors stuff. One of my great memories is being in Bend and my kids being off with some buddies floating (the Deschutes River) on inner tubes and just having a ball.”

Crow’s return to the venue coincides with a period of change for the songwriter. In 2015, Crow was at the tail end of the promotion for her 2013 album “Feels Like Home,” which found her embracing country music after collaborations with Loretta Lynn and Miranda Lambert; country/hip-hop/rocker Kid Rock and Vince Gill, among others. Though successful — the album hit No. 7 on the Billboard 200 and No. 3 on the Top Country Albums chart at its release — Crow decided to go back to her pop-rock roots on the follow-up, last year’s appropriately titled “Be Myself.”

“I’m not shunning country music,” she told Rolling Stone in an early 2017 interview. “I’m just not part of that format.”

Recording sessions for “Be Myself,” featuring Crow’s ’90s collaborators, producer/musician Jeff Trott and musician Tchad Blake, lasted “a couple months,” she said. But at the same time, Crow was also in the midst of sessions for an ambitious collaborative project that has been nearly three years in the making, and which the singer recently announced will be her last studio album (though not her last recorded work).

“I recorded with Kris Kristofferson and just felt like, you know what, it’s time for me to make a record with people I love, and that’s what I did,” Crow said. “I just started calling people, saying, ‘I’m making a record, would you be a part of it?’ and just had an incredible response. And I am saying it’s my last record — never say never — but I feel like two things. I feel like I’m not sure that people listen to albums anymore. It takes a lot to make an entire creative statement, and I think people are much more in the immediate and will put together playlists of songs, but they don’t necessarily get into the deep cuts. That’s one reason, but the other reason is, I don’t even know how I would follow this thing up.”

The still-untitled album will feature guest spots from a who’s who of country and rock musicians, many of whom have worked with Crow before: Stevie Nicks, Emmylou Harris, Sting, Joe Walsh, Willie Nelson, Don Henley (Crow’s second employer, as she put it — she sang background vocals for The Eagles singer-drummer in the late ’80s), Gary Clark Jr. and Johnny Cash, among others. First single “Wouldn’t Want to Be Like You,” released June 25 and, featuring vocals from Annie Clark of St. Vincent, takes a modern-soul approach with an insistent bass line and half-rapped, half-sung lyrics harking back to the stream-of-consciousness poetry of “All I Wanna Do.”

“Although they do sound like Sheryl Crow songs, they are kind of tailored to the person that I was singing with or playing with,” Crow said. “I did write with Joe Walsh, and we wrote like the ultimate Joe Walsh tune, and that was a blast. I wrote a tune that I felt like was just an awesome song for Stevie Nicks to sing, so I called her and said, ‘I have this song, check it out, see if you like it.’ So that’s how it went down — I would just write and think of people and shoot them the song and say, ‘What do you think?’ and in other instances I collaborated with people.”

Of course, her collaboration with Cash — a re-recording of her song “Redemption Day” from her 1996 self-titled album — was an exception. Cash also recorded the song shortly before his death, and his version eventually was released on 2010’s posthumous “American VI: Ain’t No Grave.”

“He told me — he said, ‘This is going to be the cornerstone of my next record; I feel energized by this song, I’m gonna build around it,’ and then he passed away about three months later,” Crow said. “And I kept waiting for his — you know, they put together different records, but it never came out, it never came out, it never came out. … And it did eventually come out, but I think it slipped under the radar, and so I called his family and said, ‘Look, I want to rework the song and would you be amenable to my using his demo vocals?’ And that’s what we did. I think he would really love it, and I think the timing of it would mean a lot to him as well with what’s going on in America.”

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected. In the original version, the number of times Sheryl Crow has performed in Bend was misidentified. The Bulletin regrets the error.