POLL: Counting Crows - August & Everything After

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."