POLL: Counting Crows - August & Everything After

you do not miss the music you miss being younger, don't let them shackle your glorious youth to that awful music

nostalgia is a fuckin toxin imo

I'm not nostalgic, I just miss being younger.

not sure what part of america gukbe is in where top 40 radio sounds like counting crows. down here they play lady gaga, katy perry, ke$ha, far east movement, rihanna, eminem eminem eminem, trey songz, wacka flacka doo, taylor swift and that's about it. o and the new black eyed peas but that sounds more like the gates of hell opening than counting crows.

I kinda like "Mr Jones", didn't mind the rest at the time but listened to it again a year or so again & was horrified, no nostalgia, couldn't get past Duritz' whine, like where Bono would have made the whine as majestic as he could, Duritz does the inverse, & I get that that's the early 90s in a nutshell, whatever, nevermind, but still, yuck. But "Mr Jones" is still good, I don't turn that off when it comes on the radio & I sha la la along until the last "I wanna be a big star" which sucks & sets the rest of the album in motion.

Not that new music tends to sound like Counting Crows or anything, but the top 40 stations in the Virginia area play GaGa, Beyonce, Taylor, Mayer, Mraz, etc... a few times an hour but the rest of the time they play 'modern rock' hits from 1993-1998. So there's still a lot of Counting Crows, Sheryl Crow, Counting Crows, Shawn Mullins, Eve 6, Live et al on the radio here pretty constantly.

My point being that American radio hasn't really progressed very far past that age.

I despise this record with kinda like every last fiber of my being.

This was the first album I sold twenty-four hours after buying it.

Man I hate these fuckin guys. I still use them as a music argument weapon with a certain friend who listened to this non-stop for most of 1994. He even had their live album. Ugh.

Of all the albums I was forced to listen to while working on my high school newspaper, I think I am still the angriest about having to hear this one.

not a big fan, but i refer all knee-jerk haters to "a long december"...

which is of course not on this recd so.

"mr. jones" belongs to the weird category of songs that i dislike but feel compelled to accept as "good" somehow, like i can see how it would appeal to people in the same way that all those sad sack westerberg songs appeal to me. it's a fuck sight better than "round here," anyway.

I will forever and always stan for the first two albums. Yeah, probably a high level of nostalgia involved when I listen to them now, but I don't think they became super embarrassing until the third.

Fwiw, I think I'll vote for "Sullivan Street", but I really really love "Einstein on the Beach" from this period, the one that showed up on the DGC Rarities compilation because it was so at odds with the usual dour mood of their albums. Really one of the band's only enjoyable "upbeat" songs before they started scoring shitty tunes for shittier kids movies.

loved Einstein at the time. Not heard it in so long I can't remember how it goes.

I have elaborate defenses mounted for their fourth record, Hard Candy, which, barring the "Big Yellow Taxi" cover, which was vomited up here from hell, is a really solid record. Really sonically bright, meanwhile Duritz moans about suicide and abusing prescriptions. I'm always into that sort of tension.

i like this album. lot of songs i still enjoy on it, but i will somewhat predictably vote for "Raining In Baltimore".

Meanwhile August returns me to the still-fresh hells of middle school and my intractable desire to write the worst poetry. The record is sort of unsure of what is "too much," and hey, at that age, I was too. Guess we've all been there. I'd probably vote "Rain King" just for the line "she's been dying / and I've been drinking," which will seem underwhelming just written out here but on record is screaming catharsis.

Still love all the lyrics to this record, I ain't give a fuck.

Also Recovering the Satellites is their best record, and if you like August there is pretty much no way you could be down on Recovering, so stop it.

I dated two different girls in 93 and 94 and this was both of their favorite albums. And I mean like Fucking Favorite Album.

recovering the satellites is really great in parts -- totally underrated record. i too prefer it to august.

agreed tho that the "big yellow taxi" cover is an abomination against nature. also that awful shrek song. i like to pretend this band ended with the 90s.

Out of curiosity, what's inspired the hate? I hated this kind of music in '94 already, so after ridding myself of the album I never thought about CC again.

adam duritz sang a nice duet with nanci griffith on her last decent album (afaik -- i haven't heard any new nanci griffith albums for 15 years), but when i saw her in concert her piano player sang the adam duritz part and sounded better. c.c. always seemed dull to me, but otoh i like jayhawks albums from the same period that other people find dull, so w/e.

just realizing I went all the way up to This Desert Life with these guys.

xxxpost. Honestly I haven't thought about these guys much either, though I still here Mr Jones on a fairly regular basis.

I owned and listened to this on tape back in the day but even then knew it kind of sucked. Mr Jones is OK.

bought this album when i was 13 and played the hell out of it -- i was more of a classic rock kid than a grunge kid, so I remember the reviews talking about dylan, van morrison and others making it seem really really good. but for some reason it ended up feeling kind of embarrassing. i dunno, some of it sounds pretty ok when i hear it on the radio every now and again. i would probably vote "mr. jones"?

A Murder Of One

hey i may be known in some circles as a guy who will rep the gin blossoms, but the counting crows, no, i will not do that.

if i had to pick one i would prob take angels of the silences from the next album.

As a high school Neil Gaiman dork, I was pretty upset w/these guys getting Dave McKean to do covers and "A Murder of One" w/the Sandman refs and all that.

What are the Sandman refs? I only read that series just recently.

Out of curiosity, what's inspired the hate? I hated this kind of music in '94 already, so after ridding myself of the album I never thought about CC again.

I don't mind affected singing - I'm a Bowie fan. But Duritz's affectations are the affectations of a guy trying to sing beneath his capabilities, and it's grotesque & insulting & revolting. I'm reminded of a guy I knew in college who drove a beat-up VW bus, which he totaled one weekend, so he had to drive the car he'd actually driven west from his home. You know: the fucking Ferrari. That guy is the lifestyle equivalent of the Counting Crows singer. His singing sounds like his hair looks, always. The only excuse for this style of singing is if you can reasonably persuade the listener that you are in a sort of ecstasy within which your voice & enunciation obeys some higher law, cf. Van Morrison. It's hard for me to imagine a singer I'd like less than Adam D; it's like nails on a chalkboard, except that I'd rather listen to nails on a chalkboard for an hour every day than to the Counting Crows for fifteen minutes once a month.

kkvgz let me answer your question in the dorkiest way possible:

http://img251.imageshack.us/i/iamsoangryrightnow.jpg/

http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/5347/iamsoangryrightnow.jpg

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

When I was fifteen my friend once made me listen to Perfect Blue Buildings on repeat for two hours after he had been dumped, so definitely not that. Don't really have anything more to say about this album.

Don Dixon!!!

But Duritz's affectations are the affectations of a guy trying to sing beneath his capabilities, and it's grotesque & insulting & revolting

u r essentially a failure as a human being & i hope u get swallowed up by a bog

bros voice on this record is insane srsly hes doing some brutalist neo-primitive thing w/it. like on 'raining in baltimore' which is just like a piano & some 90s studio retardedness (like a dulcimer idk) hes p much wielding his voice its so laden w/emotion & 'meaning'. most of the lyrics on the songs are terrible & so i can get not really singing w/ a lot of nuance or craft or w/e & just like hammering home on this shit. its incredible fuiud

the songwriting is p not great in places but theres a line in 'anna begins' thats like 'every word is nonsense but i understand' & thats kinda how i feel abt this record. its this monolith of sweeping emotions its not meant to be examined really closely or considered in detail its dimensions are meant to awe...

ne way i have a playlist w/ this and the spinanes 'arches & aisles' and mag fields 'holiday' & its a p fukken badass playlist so w/e

u r essentially a failure as a human being & i hope u get swallowed up by a bog

"I need a friend...I need a phone caaaalll."

maybe if you listen...reeeaaall haaard.

booming post from lamp

listening to a bunch of counting crows on youtube cause I couldn't remember what most of these songs sound like. duritz has written some good songs (and decent lyrics, even) I think, but this album doesn't contain many of them. I think that late-period pop-rock/shrek soundtrack counting crows is better than the 1st album. voted 'round here'

lainie84
10 months ago 63
I don't know one person who DOESN'T like the Counting Crows!!!!

It felt like that in the 90s to be fair. I've seen them live twice.

I've seen adam duritz on the street a bunch of times, he is an absolutely grotesque person up close

wasn't he nailing 2/3 of the Friends chicks in the 90s?

im saying, this is a guy who has dreadlock extensions, and yet he was banging courteney cox and jennifer aniston back when that meant something, thats gotta count for a lot

every time I saw him that's exactly what I was thinking

i wonder if he still has a checklist he looks at every day, trying to figure out how he can cross off Kudrow's name

maybe they had sex with the dreadlock extensions instead...?

I can't imagine it'd be that hard now, what the hell has she done lately?

one step away from Monica/Rachel tentacle porn. thanks, internet. xpost

dude shoulda just gone after matt perry during his pill addiction days and called it a push on the hat trick

I think I like it now too? hard to say, I loved it as a kid so much. Just listened to this after about 10 years away from it. Sounds great still.

the whole album, that is.

apparently he did a covers album last year, I am listening to it on spotify it's pretty good

Kinda lost interest after the 2nd album, haven't listened to anything since.

listen to 'mrs potters lullaby'

third album is a bit spotty but has great moments but i think hard candy is equal to the first two records

I just dont feel the need to listen, you know?

Mrs Potters Lullaby was nice enough.

but now I am! damn you

Sounds good, def skipping american girls though

Good Time guitar tones are pretty rad

this album is cool but the thread revival actually made me put on Recovering The Satellites instead because i am a little obsessed with that record

I've got A Murder of One on repeat again, which is what made me start the poll in the first place. Such a great choon.

1. unlike everyone else my age, i didn't listen to this record at all when it was out, and thus feel no nostalgia for it.

2. i do, however, think both "a long december" and that einstein on the beach song are pretty great.

3. saw these dudes live last summer and they were hella boring.

RTS is a great record too yeah. Needs its own poll.

Good Time guitar tones are pretty rad

yeah it's got hella pink floyd vibes

this is so great:
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9680725/nirvana-utero-counting-crows-august-everything-20-years-later

I bought this on CD from a Sam the Record Man a couple weeks after it had been first released. Some friend of mine had read a review and recommended it to me. It was a Sam's "buy it, try it" promotion and I brought it back a few hours later. The clerk seemed surprised and told me no one had actually brought it back before. At least this thread answers some questions I've had.

Also released on September 14, 1993: Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell II: Back to Hell, Morphine's Cure for Pain, and the Judgment Night soundtrack.

I'd much rather read a zillion word Grantland think piece on that last one.

man, spottie, you weren't kidding

i was sitting here thinking abt this album after noticing that 'mr jones' was right in the middle of that 20-years-back billboard top 20 from another thread. like, what happened to this band in my life? i remember still listening to their second album (first year in college), and probably even the live album that followed (but i don't remember what i thought of that at all). and from then on, probably under the influence of various new tastes and coolness and wanting to leave my teenaged self behind, somehow i just stopped listening to counting crows -completely-.

like, i remember having a radio show in college and am SURE i would never have played counting crows on it. yet i remember growing cool toward pearl jam, don't think i would have played them either, but even when 'yield' (was it?) came out and my girlfriend was quite into it, i was willing to stick with them and give the new one a chance, still listened to 'vitalogy', etc.

this is hard for me to understand because at the age when i was listening to 'august & everything after' i LOVED that record. not loved, just—it wasn't a matter of enjoying it or appreciating it for musical reasons, it was like an annex of my emotional life set up outside of me and capable of being repeated arbitrarily and endlessly.

to the point where i can't even recall ever having come to any -musical- judgment about this band (like i did about plenty of others that i liked to listen to when i was ~13, 14, 15, 16). no opportunity to compare their roots moves to the people i didn't realize at the time they were aping. no opportunity to listen to the 'too much' singing and lyrics and everything with some more mature perspective (or, like, to ask, what must those songs have been about, sounded like, felt like, if they felt like they were about / for me at 14 when they were being sung by a grown person with actual experience in life?). just—no more. i left it behind. and have not ever wanted to go back.

and it's weird to me that 'all apologies' and 'mr jones' were actually in the charts at the same time, because i associate the former with, like, maturity and mourning and grown-up respectable feelings (even though i also remember hearing it as the customary closer at the ~~alt rock laser light show~~ me and my girlfriend would go see like all the time—they played 'cannonball' too!!), but associate the latter with the endless wistful hours i spent wishing i could do something about my feelings for the girls i liked, before i ever had the courage to talk to any of them, ask any of them out. i realize that i've done a little reorganizing in my emotional memories—shoved some stuff back further into the junior-high past and pulled some other stuff along with me further into the future. when it was all in more or less the same place.

so this is super otm:

I don’t know if I ever said those exact words to a woman, but I’ve said something like those words. And hearing Duritz sing them never fails to make me cringe a bit. Not because it makes me think about Duritz and the circumstances of his life, but because it makes me think about my life, and not a particularly good part of my life. This is Duritz’s unique talent as a songwriter: He vividly re-creates the feeling of your lowest of personal lows — the “it’s 4:30 a.m. on a Tuesday and it doesn’t get much worse than this” moments that many of us would just as soon forget.

Listening to In Utero makes those moments seem noble; it connects you with a rock legend and elevates your feelings to similarly larger-than-life status. Listening to August and Everything After makes loneliness seem like what it really is: a small and pitiful feeling drenched in a disgusting cocktail of tears and snot that causes outsiders to recoil. If talking about culture is really a vehicle for people to talk about themselves, then it’s not surprising that remembering the former is more tantalizing than remembering the latter. In Utero represents who we’d like to be; August and Everything After is who we want to hide. It’s not musical history we’re revising. It’s our own.

but i'm still not going to listen to the record.

I always felt it was weird that there was a Mobile Fidelity GoldDisc of this album--not now, but back like in '96. How anal would you have to be to buy a audiophile copy of a basically still new release? I can hear some Matthew Perry on Friends-esque douche testifying over a Zima, "I mean, honestly, you have not truly heard August and Everything After until you hear it on GoldDisc!"

great post j. love this

this is hard for me to understand because at the age when i was listening to 'august & everything after' i LOVED that record. not loved, just—it wasn't a matter of enjoying it or appreciating it for musical reasons, it was like an annex of my emotional life set up outside of me and capable of being repeated arbitrarily and endlessly.

Excellent posts

A Murder of One has been stuck in my head for three days. At first I was okay with that, but now it's time for us to part ways.

attn spottie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQpRNR90qME

oh man!

straight into my veins

I think there's an excellent r&b cover of "Anna Begins" just waiting to be made.

Add a vote for "A Murder of One" to put it over the top. Done.

30 years old today

The correct answer is "Omaha."