Before you run away from me / Before you’re lost between the notes
The beat goes round and round / The beat goes round and round — Radiohead, “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”
***
I’m taking a little break today from more serious topics to start a series in which I review my top 10 influential albums of all time. I selected these albums based on emotional impact on me personally and quality of songs from top to bottom and not necessarily commercial success. I also limited the list to one album per artist. I don’t normally get too biographical here, but I thought this series would be a good exercise — number one, to give a renewed, close listen these albums again and perhaps, pick out elements that I might have missed before either lyrically or musically, and number two, to openly reckon with my own musical past about what these songs and albums have meant to me over the years or what they still mean to me. As such, some of these entries will feel more like traditional reviews of classic albums, while others will have a more personal bent. At the very least, I hope it makes for some interesting reading. And away we go …
Top 10 albums with five honorable mentions:
- Counting Crows: “August and Everything After”
- Hum, “You’d Prefer an Astronaut”
- Radiohead: “Kid A”
- R.E.M.: “Automatic for the People”
- Smashing Pumpkins: “Siamese Dream”
- +Live+: “Throwing Copper”
- Death Cab for Cutie: “Plans”
- Our Lady Peace: “Happiness Is Not a Fish That You Can Catch”
- The Beatles: “Magical Mystery Tour”
- Pearl Jam: “Vs.”
And the best of the rest:
- Tool: “Lateralus”
- Alanis Morisette: “Jagged Little Pill”
- Hootie and the Blowfish: “Cracked Rearview”
- The Cranberries: “No Need To Argue”
- Bush, “Sixteen Stone”
“August and Everything After“
It’s hard to overstate how much of an impact Counting Crows’ breakout debut album had on my life as a teenager. If, as a younger boy in middle school or junior high, The Beatles introduced me to rock and roll music and unlocked in me an emotional side unlike anything I had experienced up to that point, Counting Crows broke me open and helped me lay bare feelings that I either didn’t know I had or didn’t know how to access. I don’t remember ever crying while listening to a song before “August and Everything After” came along, but even today, when I get a fresh listen to songs like “Anna Begins,” “Sullivan Street” or “Raining In Baltimore,” the emotional weight of the lyrics, combined with the music and the vocals of lead singer Adam Duritz, not just singing the lyrics, but feeling and embodying the lyrics and sounding almost desperate at times in his delivery, often makes me tear up all over again.
Casual music fans will certainly know the high-water tracks “Mr. Jones” and “Round Here.” Indeed, it was on the strength of “Round Here,” a quintessential Counting Crows song with a poetic and vulnerable style of songwriting, and particular the band’s performance of it on “The Late Show with David Letterman” that really jump-started their popularity when fans realized that the band, and Adam’s singing style, reached an emotional depth that only a select number of bands actually achieve.
At the time, I was coming off an interest in 1980s and early 90s country music, oldies rock and roll, Billy Joel and other videos I saw on VH1. I discovered “August and Everything After” at a crucial and impressionable time in my life, and needless to say, the album struck a chord with me because before that point, I had never come across a band or songwriter that touched me to the same depths that Duritz’s songwriting touched me. His songs seemed to get at the core of who I was and what I was struggling with in the mid-1990s, and as I grew up with the band into adulthood and matured with the band, the lyrics remained poignant as I looked back and remembered the well-worn feelings of isolation or longing or despair that troubled me as a youth, and often still trouble me.
Drawn to the emotion of Counting Crows’ music, the band, along with others like R.E.M., The Beatles and Pearl Jam, inspired me to write my own poetry or music, but more than that, the imagery of Duritz’s lyrics, even today, is perhaps responsible for my preference, some 25 years later, for the color gray or for bleak and cloudy winter days.
Tyler Clark, with Consequence of Sound, described Duritz’s various gloomy images on “August” as melancholy snow globes:
In the scenes Counting Crows conjure, the season is a perpetual state of almost-winter, the weather overcast, the time of day always slightly later than it responsibly should be. Within these melancholy snow globes, Duritz grapples with woes both private and interpersonal, lit here and there by a bedroom lamp, a neon beer sign, the dome light of a car speeding all by itself down a long, dark road.
“August” was the second or third CD I ever owned, and I also had the cassette version for playing in the car and in the Walkman. My obsession with this band and with this album ran deep. I don’t entirely remember the content, but I once gave a school presentation on the symbolic nature of the song, “Rain King.” I remember taking the album along on at least one or two summer trips with my family and either “forcing” my parents to play it over the car speakers — they were actually kind enough to play it for me and endure my new foray into alternative rock and roll music — or listening to the album through my headphones and not so quietly singing along.
And as a lasting testament to the inspiration I drew from Counting Crows, I had taken a Sharpie and wrote the line, “In August and Everything After, I’m After Everything,” on the back of my backpack in the same font style as the album cover above. The line came from a song that wasn’t on the album and was subsequently recorded and released in January of last year, but some of the lyrical fragments were visible on the album cover, and they spoke to me, namely, the line I wrote on the backpack, “I stumbled into Washington Square,” “I’m sorry” and “You look into her eyes, and it’s more than your (heart will allow) …” I couldn’t read the rest of the line in parenthesis, but these spoke to me about regret, longing and not knowing which direction to take or whether to take any direction at all. The actual line, “In August and Everything After, I’m After Everything” meant a lot to me personally because I was a shy or reserved child and struggled, not only to meet friends, but to meet girls, and the lyric suggested a kind of pessimistic hopefulness that things might be different once school started and new opportunities to meet people would abound, in contrast to the often lonely summer months when meeting new people was less likely. Duritz was born on Aug. 1, so for him the meaning of the line may have been more literal, but for me, it was the symbolic hope of a new start, a new start that, admittedly, I didn’t quite believe in.
But I nonetheless hoped.
I’ll go through a few of the songs that had the most impact on me as a teenager. The emotional depth and weight of these selected songs, along with my opinion that the album, as a cohesive piece of art, is strong from top to bottom, is the reason why it gets No. 1 billing on this list.
Round Here
Step out the front door like a ghost
Into the fog where no one notices the
Contrast of white on white.
And in between the moon and you the angels
Get a better view of the crumbling
Difference between wrong and right
The first track of the album, “Round Here,” opens with about 20 seconds of feedback leading into the main guitar riff that sets the tone for a song that seems to be about a person who is grappling with newfound freedom and doesn’t know which direction life is going to take, as was certainly the case for me as a teenager and into my early- to- mid-20s. That person may be living on their own and away from authority figures for the first time, and thus is able to do whatever they want (“We’re never sent to bed early and nobody stays up late”) or newly separated from a partner or both. In either case, the introductory lyrics suggest a narrator who doesn’t know how to find their place in the world.
It’s difficult for me to pinpoint exactly what this song means to me in concrete terms. Like many of these songs, there isn’t a particular person or memory that comes to mind when I listen to “Round Here” today, but it’s more like a feeling, the feeling of teenage angst, the feeling of being locked inside a set of rules under someone else’s roof, the longing for liberation and the bittersweet release of finally feeling free under a vacant sky, yet weighed down by loneliness, indecision and aimlessness or depression. When I’m in the car by myself and there is no one to hear or see me, and thus no self-consciousness, I can sometimes tap into raw emotion, put myself inside the lyrics of this song, wandering through the fog and trying to find my way in life, singing these lines near the end of the song:
Round here she’s always on my mind
Round here, hey man, I got lots of time
Round here we’re never sent to bed early and nobody makes us wait
then, as the swirling feelings of sadness, malcontent and anger mix and build, I sometimes find myself virtually screaming this climax:
Round here we stay up very, very, very late (!)
Perfect Blue Buildings
Just down the street from your hotel, baby
I stay at home with my disease
And ain’t this position familiar, darling
Well, all monkeys do what they see
Help me stay awake, I’m falling …
Adam has said this song is about insomnia, but I have always personalized this track, and particularly the lyrics, “I stay at home with my disease,” to reflect the breathing problems that I dealt with most of my adult life before I received a double lung transplant in February 2017. Over time, chronic breathing problems (“I stay at home with my disease”) breaks your will and in your worst moments, makes you want to stop participating in life (“There’s a dead man trying to get out”). Couple that with social problems — having trouble making new friends or meeting people and the depression that comes with it — and sometimes, you just want to stay inside and be left alone with your “disease,” and you come to prefer the dream world (“Asleep in perfect blue buildings/Beside the green apple sea”), what life could be when you close your eyes, to what life actually is.
Anna Begins
Other than the emotions associated with losing a love or feeling the loss of a love that only existed in the imagination or dreamworld, I, again, don’t have a specific memory or idea associated with “Anna Begins,” but it’s one of four or five songs on this record, along with “Round Here,” “Sullivan Street,” “Time and Time Again” and “Raining in Baltimore” that routinely summon strong feelings in me with each new listen. One thing I have always appreciated about Counting Crows is their ability to take the listener on an emotional journey in their songs, and this song has a buildup into the final chorus that sometimes brings tears and sometimes just makes me sing at the top of my lungs with Adam, feeling the pain of loss and longing and regret alongside the character in the song.
In “Anna Begins,” it seems that Anna and the speaker are exchanging doubts about whether the relationship will work or whether they’re even “ready for this sort of thing.” At first, “when kindness falls like rain,” Anna changes her mind. Later in the song, Anna changes his mind, and he reflects on how he loves even the little things about her (“Every time she sneezes I think it’s love, and oh lord, I’m not ready for this sort of thing”),” but despite this, he holds onto his doubts. Near the end of the song, when he finally decides he is ready for a relationship with her, it’s too late, and she’s gone:
Her kindness bangs a gong
It’s moving me along and Anna begins to fade away
It’s chasing me away
She disappears and
Oh Lord, I’m not ready for this sort of thing
Time and Time Again
I wanted so badly
Somebody other than me
Staring back at me
But you were gone
This is a wasteland of a song — lonely and barren — that comforted me in some of the moments that I have felt most alone. Like so many times traveling in the car by myself on the open road either going back and forth to Boston or South Carolina, listening to this song, I could imagine myself “traveling on a freeway beneath this graveyard western sky” heading deep into the desert outside California with nothing but the sky and the setting sun as a backdrop. This reminds me of another Counting Crows song called “John Appleseed’s Lament,” where the speaker in the song personifies the sky as a girlfriend or partner that keeps him company in the absence of others:
I call the wind Maria because I do not know her face
I call the endless sky Amelia
Because she stays with me from place to place
I call the sun my love Emmanuelle
Because she cradled me in her embrace
Sullivan Street
This one speaks to me of regret in love and loss and the eventuality of knowing that a relationship, sooner or later, is going to end (“Pretty soon now, I won’t come around”) and the ensuing loneliness and despair that will follow. When the first D chord hits whenever I fire up this song, it’s like my heart begins preparing for the emotions that are about to come flooding forth in the next four minutes. In the first verse, he is thinking about driving her home and already describing the relationship or memories of the relationship as “shadows,” and in the second verse, the couple has already broken up, and she is pretending not to know him. He is pretending not to care. By the third verse, he’s describing himself as “just another rider (or lover) burned to the ground.” While I can certainly relate to the experience of driving a girl home all the while doubting that the relationship is going to last, the song’s overall aesthetic — Adam’s voice, combined with the music and lyrics — brings up deep emotions almost every time I listen.
Raining In Baltimore
This is a simple and sad song about missing someone who is far away, and the solo instrument and Adam’s pained voice add to the effect. As I understand it, the speaker is in Baltimore and his love is 3,500 miles away across the country, and he is probably not going to see her again (“What would you change if you could?”).
Nonetheless, he is feeling utterly alone without her. He needs a phone call. A raincoat. A big love. A plane ride. A sunburn. He can’t get any answers or any change; except for the rain and missing her, everything else is the same.
A Murder of One
During Counting Crows’ This Desert Life tour, I got to see Counting Crows in Toledo, Ohio. I lived in South Carolina at the time, and being obsessed with the band as I was and since Toledo was one of the closest places they were coming to where I lived that summer, I took a road trip by myself. The concert was at the Toledo Park Zoo ampitheater. During that particular tour, Adam usually screamed “Step right up!” at the beginning of “A Murder of One,” which was a cue for people in the audience to jump up and down while the rest of the introduction was played before the opening verse. Already having had my fill of beer and under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have budged, but on this night, I, along with couple thousand strangers, started bouncing together in sync, as if there was no longer any real world in which to return, as if we, alone — myself, my fellow Counting Crows fans and the band — experienced life as a singular entity under that dark globe of moonlight and stars. It was one of my more memorable concert experiences.
Jim Farber has said that “August and Everything After” painted a
fully credible portrait of a young man struggling to accept himself, to find some way to be comfortable in his own skin.
And perhaps that explains, more than anything, why I took to the album and the band so much. In 1993 when the album was released, I was in transition, not just musically, but emotionally and as a person. I wasn’t very attuned to my own emotions. I didn’t have great self-esteem, and I had trouble meeting people, especially girls. I didn’t know who I wanted to be, and I was unsure of where I was headed. I didn’t know how I felt about life or that it was even OK to have feelings or to express them as a boy. Even if I sometimes felt alone in life, I somehow felt less alone when I hit play on the album with the knowledge that someone else, somewhere, had experienced similar feelings. In “August” and in Duritz’ lyrics, I found that it was acceptable to have and express deep emotional feelings. Like I suppose many others have in my situation, as impressionable teenagers just beginning to dabble in a new world, a newly discovered amalgamation of poetry and song, I found a kind of kindred spirit in Duritz and the work of Counting Crows, and I found a voice, even if it was someone else’s, in music and meaning that would inspire me to create my own for decades to come.
In August and everything after, I was after everything.