Letter of Recommendation: Counting Crows

Photo Credit: The Los Angeles Weekly

Counting Crows released their first album in 1993. Entitled August and Everything After, it was released by Geffen Records, known for signing bands like Guns N’ Roses, Nirvana, blink-182, and Weezer. The band came out of Berkeley, California in 1991, and the current lineup includes Adam Duritz as lead vocalist and on piano, David Bryson on guitar, Charlie Gillingham on keyboard and accordion, Dan Vickrey as lead guitar, David Immerglück on guitar, banjo, and mandolin, Jim Bogios as percussionist, and Millard Powers on bass guitar.

Of the facts listed above, I knew only one – that the band emerged from Berkeley. The others, I looked up because they are what one expects to read in a music review, or, rather, a music recommendation. However, there’s so much more to a band than the big shows they’ve played or hits they’ve released. Music is an escape from reality, an opportunity to go somewhere you’ve never been, hear something you’ve never heard, or feel something you’ve never felt.

I picked up a Counting Crows CD for the first time in 2nd and Charles in Broomfield, Colorado. The store was my first foray into a specialty, secondhand music shop, one where the CDs, records, and cassettes weren’t relegated to the back doors of Barnes and Noble but took up two floors of their own and were displayed as proudly and truly as they would have been in the 80s and 90s when they were on the shelves for the first time.

Films About Ghosts came out of the two for $5 box, because that was about all my seventh grade self could afford on an allowance that only occasionally was left over after the biweekly Starbucks and Target run middle schoolers considered the peak of their social lives. My CD player, acquired for $5 from my mom’s friend’s garage sale, was beaten up, outwardly scratched, and occasionally had to be taken outside to receive radio signals. It played CDs beautifully though, and listening to them remains my personal favorite way of hearing a song.

The first track, “Angels of the Silences”, reminded me vaguely of a calmer version of the angesty, gothic metal I had come to love from bands like Black Veil Brides. At the time, my punk phase was in full swing. I literally hid my Taylor Swift CDs in Guns N’ Roses cases to cover up my soft side and wore the same tshirts from Hot Topic over and over again, and I quickly dismissed the song as good in theory, but in practice not nearly as satisfying as one that would scream unintelligible words about death.

Had I turned the dial on the CD player then and stopped listening, I would never have embarked on the journey that began when I heard “Round Here” for the first time. It has become a song of solace, perfectly explained by “step out the front door like a ghost/into the fog where no one notices/ the contrast of white on white.” That very first time, it wrapped me up into a safety blanket. The song takes your terror, whether it’s over the things in your mind or the world around you, and makes you realize that the whole world is terrified too. It reminds you that no one can really deal with anything, that in reality every human being is merely doing their best and trying to keep from jumping. And ultimately, even as desperate as that description makes it seem, the song is almost unbearably hopeful – a reminder that there’s a place, there’s love, and there’s time.

Listening to Counting Crows will never feel quite the same way as it did that very first time. I will never lay on my floor, feeling vulnerable to a band that somehow, someway, knew who I was. They understood me on a level that had never before been summed up in anything but the way my best friend would mouth “are you okay?” at just the right time. Counting Crows saved me that night, not because I was in any danger but because I learned that I would never be alone in handling it.

They continue to do so, every time I turn on “She Don’t Want Nobody Near” and listen to “she don’t want nobody home… but she don’t want to be alone.” They continue to do so, when the alternative radio station turns on “Mr. Jones” and the first eight bars ring out with “I was down at New Amsterdam.” They continue to do so, because Counting Crows captures the feelings that everybody knows and nobody explains and the whole world hides behind.

That’s why it shouldn’t matter that Counting Crows has never won a Grammy or that they’ve never played Lollapalooza. The heart they bring to every song, the passion with which Duritz plays every show, and the way they make one feel are enough.