POLL: Counting Crows - August & Everything After

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 there's some other thread where he is referred to as Fatty Dread, I approved.

I was into the next couple albums for a while back in the day, and I still like of the songs (This Desert Life had nice production too, and some nifty McKean artwork in the liner notes). This one kinda blows though, there's just so much dull, morose shit on it. Time and Time Again? Ugh. Anna Begins is probably the most interesting thing on here but I don't think I've heard any of these in years.

btw the title track to this is dope. i was a member of the counting crows message board when i was like 12 or 13 and i remember the day it was first played live, good memories <3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sOd0Bzjqho

voting anna begins, def.

a friend of mine is in a "weird" band with one of those guys. yes, "weird". they all have fake names. you'd never believe that he wrote all those corny ass songs.

the biggest Counting Crows fans went on to become even bigger Dave Matthews fans

abbott: that Sandman panel is a take on a legit nursery rhyme!

I just remembered that I gave this album quite a few chances because one of the Camper Van Beethoven guys is on it.

I somehow avoided hearing more than one or two CC songs during the 90s, and when someone played me an entire album of theirs - possibly this one, not too sure - sometime circa 2004 I thought it was some earnestly dull alt-country record which might have been (then-)recently extravagantly praised every month in the pages of Uncut magazine

so I was slightly surprised when I found out who it was and connected it to their 21st century reputation, but hey, plus ça change I guess

upon further review due to this thread there are imo nice guitar tones and phrases all over this record.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

oh well time for a run-off to decide this matter once and for all

3 of the top 4 are my favorites, so it's cool.

Emmy Rossum has revealed to USA Today that she and Adam Duritz broke up quietly two months ago.

"We're still very close friends," she told the paper.

Emmy started dating the Counting Crows frontman last fall, just as her ex-husband, music executive Justin Siegel, filed for divorce after a year and a half of marriage.

Earlier this year, Emmy explained Adam's appeal to People.

"I get why chicks dig him," she said. "He's extremely kind, incredibly intelligent, thoughtful, creative and respectful."

Adam has dated a slew of beautiful actresses, including Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox.

Man, Counting Crows really were into alliteration, eh?

amazingly i heard "mr jones" for the first time in my friend's car the other week and was like "who is this??" - i had only ever thought of counting crows as some incredibly uncool 90s band but this song is amazing, feels like it fits pretty nicely into the sort of rock i like from the last 15 years or so, falls somewhere on the third eye blind----gaslight anthem spectrum

sort of can't believe ship hates that song

I could imagine thinking about that song differently had I only heard it 1 time instead of 10000000000000 times

the lyrics are mawkish & inept but 'time and time again' has some really pretty guitar work & great chorus imo

also i like to think its taken from a really amazing alice munro short story

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."