Note before starting: I’ve loved Counting Crows since I first heard them, or first heard Adam do one of their songs, anyway, as the Himalayans on one of my “crawl the local record store” adventures in California as a high school student. I am biased.
I take a lot of crap from people for the music that I like. I say that halfway jokingly– like I care. There was a time when I was 18 and I could wow you with a new record you’d never heard, and you’d want more, and you’d sit on the edge of my bed like a crack fiend staring at a pipe while I made you a mix CD on my massive stereo system. Those days are over, though I still make a good call or two (the Morning Benders– if you don’t know them go get all their stuff NOW. Really. You’ll thank me later).
I have retained a love for many of the bands I “found” in high school. Some of them I felt like I literally discovered– not in the record label sense, but in the sense that in the pre-internet (or early usenet internet) days, there weren’t websites to announce “hey, if you liked Moby, you’ll love this pretentious techno dude we found playing a keyboard outside Starbucks!” I had to do legwork. I went on road trips and brought stuff home with me (this band called Live from Penn, these guys called Counting Crows from Berkeley, and have you heard this Orange County/USC pseudo-punk outfit called the Offspring? Their lead singer led my campus tour!).
Many of the bands I was into back then have become legend and no one will crack on me over. No one disses someone who listened to Nirvana before SLTS, who knows the Melvins and the Screaming Trees. No one ever gets on my case because I can sing “Stardog Champion” from memory.
But I take some crap over Counting Crows.
So here’s a quick defense of Counting Crows, for those of you who might have never given them a chance.
First, five reasons I will always love them:
1) I cried like a baby, and had to pull my car over, the first time I heard “Mr. Jones.” I was in that exact state of mind. That song is beautiful. Yes, it got overplayed, but what didnt’ in the mid-1990s? How many times have you heard “Shoop?” “No Diggity?” “This is how we do it?”
2) The first time I saw them in concert, the power went out at the ever-awesome Eastwood Theatre in Indy. Adam remembered me from chatting at the door. So he invited me to sit on the edge of the stage and sing rounds of “Oh Susanna” with him while they fixed the power.
3) I listen to “A Long December” every day in the month of December every year. I like traditions.
4) Only two people have ever rocked that haircut, and Sideshow Bob is a cartoon.
5) Counting Crows never tried to be cool. It seems like since Coldplay, everyone who is top 40 spends forever cultivating their coolness. Well, other than LCD Soundsystem. And Daft Punk is playing at his hooouse-ah!
And now, the actual defense I urge you to try to refute. Ten amazing lyrics by Adam Duritz that are, at the very least, artful (and I’d say heartrendingly poetic):
1) If dreams are like movies/then memories are films about ghosts
2) The President’s in bed tonight, but he can’t get to sleep/cuz all the cowboys on the radio are killers
3) if I could make it rain today/and wash away this sunny day/down to the gutter/I would/just to get a change of pace/things are getting worse but I feel a lot better/and that’s all that really matters to me
4) I’ve got bones within my skin, mister/there’s a skeleton in every man’s house/beneath the dust and love and sweat that lies on everyone/there’s a dead man trying to get out
5) I dreamed I saw you walking/up a hillside in the snow/casting shadows on the winter sky/as you stood there, counting crows
6) The circus has fallen/down on it’s knees/the big top is crumbling down
7) I see God up on the ceiling/I see angels overhead/and he seems so close, as he reaches out his hand/we are never quite as close as we are led to understand
8 ) It’s a lifetime commitment, recovering the satellites/and all I want to know is/when are you going to come down?
9) Believe in me/help me believe in anything/I want to be someone who believes
10) In the middle of the night/there’s an old man threading his toes through a bucket of rain/hey, mister, you don’t want to walk on water/cuz you’re gonna walk all over me
It’s art, people.
-Phill