POLL: Counting Crows - August & Everything After

such a dope album but 'anna begins' is the best track

The only marginally tolerable thing pineapple-head Duritz has been involved in, to my mind, was "6th Avenue Heartache" by the also strenuously mediocre Wallflowers. His harmonies on the chorus were a nice touch. Beyond that, blecch.

what does it feel like, to be so dead inside???

Alex is probably right. My feelings for this album are absolutely 100% grounded in nostalgia. If I could assess it in the abstract, I'd probably hate it too.

Johnny Fever I dig you a lot! You are one of my favorite posters on this music board! So it grieves to report that I despise this record with kinda like every last fiber of my being. There aren't a lot of bands I just outright hate actively, but this is one of them. It's like they missed the entire point of all the music they like, and then made that point-missing their career.

what does it feel like, to be so dead inside???

I presume this is a lyrical allusion to the insufferably trite ouvre of the band in question, but in the even that it isn't and it's a question aimed in my direction....

If failing to be impressed by the mawkish, middle-of-the-road dribble that is Counting Crows is equal to being "dead inside," then come fucking bury me.

if anybody wants to discover that they like Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" more than they thought they did, just listen to Counting Crows urinating in the song's face, which is what their cover of it amounts to. You will find yourself saying, man, I may not love this song, but it surely deserves better than this.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_hfV0f19SrQ8/TD_xOIH2-jI/AAAAAAAAAGI/7Yru3_ObXYY/s1600/vanessa_carlton.jpg
mmm bop bop!

don dixon!

anyhow heard it a ton at the time, if it had come out a few years later it'd probably be regarded as a college rock classic or something like 10,000 maniacs. enjoyed it somewhat at the time - not as much as the connells or 10,000 maniacs but more than live or even gin blossoms, though time has revised my opinion on that last one; i like r.e.m, i like van morrison. the only ones i can recall at all are the three adult alternative radio still play the fuck out of (mr. jones, round here, rain king) and very vaguely 'perfect blue buildings'. of those tolerate 'mr jones' most today (ie at all); the only counting crows i would say i like is 'a long december' and tangentially 'sixth avenue heartache' (which i kinda love).

if anybody wants to discover that they like Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" more than they thought they did, just listen to Counting Crows urinating in the song's face, which is what their cover of it amounts to.

Yeah, you'll notice I made a point of dismissing everything they did after this album. But that cover was especially egregious and evil-hearted.

as a recovering CC fan, i don't get why you'd like this one and not the next two...

I'd already moved on to other musics by the time the later albums were released and was at the height of my indie rock snob phase, so I a) don't know those albums very well and b) don't like what I actually remember of them.

Yeah, you'll notice I made a point of dismissing everything they did after this album. But that cover was especially egregious and evil-hearted.

lol oh yeah I totally did it's just like this is one of those bands where if you enjoy hearing me get ridiculously overheated about something totally unworthy of it, just mention them and I will be frothing within minutes, totally can't help myself

it's like their whole deal is "eddie vedder doing his impression of van morrison doing his impression of an emo garth brooks"

an emo garth brooks

CHRIS RAINES 4EVA!

classic album. lamp otm. anna begins.

yeah gotta be anna begins

Murder of One. I got back into these songs for a while a couple years ago and then got out of them again, because the album is really really mediocre as a whole, but that song still gives me chills of nostalgia for 1993.

'Round Here, because it reminds me of the MST3K bit where Mike Nelson dresses as Adam Duritz and sings part of it... horribly.
It also reminds me of how much I'm starting to miss the 1990s. I hated living through them but now I miss the music.

turn on a top 40 radio station in the US and you won't miss it very much.

lol was just typing "Think 90s music is still available if you track it down."

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.

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

lol get real you losers this band blows

"all your life is such a shame, shame, shame"

still rep hard 4 this record dont give a fukk

"all your life is such a shame, shame, shame"

That's the bit of the song that made me start the poll in the first place.

That bit right there is definitely, definitely the best thing they did.

Yeah thats a great part, the machine gun snares on the last hook get me every time. Love how the album ends after that climax.

Also:

I wanna get me a little... oblivion... baby
I try to keep myself.. AWAAAAAYEEEEYAAAAYEEEEEYAAAAAAA FROM ME

The funk guitar tones on Round Here, and also the drums when the song rebuilds. Fukkit, the whole 2nd half fuuid.

the Anna Begins intro and all the key changes

HER KINDNESS BANGS A GONG... ITS MOVIN ME ALLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG

The organ on Ghost Train.

I decided I liked mrs jones the last time I heard it so I guess a 10000000000001st listen was what it took

err mr.

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."