He Stopped Loving Crows Today
Maybe I’m ashamed of liking the Counting Crows.
We all have bands we’ll lay down on the train tracks to defend. Their music is a hill of pride and devotion worth dying on. I can think of dozens of bands I will aggressively defend against insult and assault no matter the cost to my dignity or to whatever perceptions others might derive of my musical tastes. Hanson, for example.
Counting Crows is not one of those bands.
But then there are the other bands, the bands we fell in love with — or at least we sure did fancy them a whole bunch at some point — but the romance cooled. Often we find ourselves a bit embarrassed, maybe even ashamed, that we ever liked them in the first place.
The Housemartins. Hootie and the Blowfish. White Lion. Enya. These are just a sampling of hundreds of bands and acts — some massively successful, others barely heard of — whose albums I purchased or ripped from friends, whose songs I genuinely found enjoyable on some level. In my small or big circle of friends and acquaintances, these bands had cache at some point. Then I would wake up one day, and everyone had deserted them. And I, like Peter before the rooster could crow thrice, denied these bands my fidelity. I knew them not. I liked them not.
These aren’t Guilty Pleasures so much as old cars on cinder blocks or high school love letters that sit ignored and unthought-of in the attic.
Counting Crows have long teetered in this category.
I love love love August and Everything After. It is a major soundtrack for two years of my young adult life. Recovering the Satellites continues to hold up as one of the finer sophomore efforts of the last 30 years and has far more in common thematically with The Bends by Radiohead than most people care to know.
I’ve had plenty of opportunities to expand my Counting Crows collection beyond their first three studio albums, all strong outings, all quality sonic experiences, yet never once have I been genuinely been tempted to do so. The alpha of Counting Crows in my universe is 1993, and the omega is 1999. Supposedly they’ve released another four studio albums this century, and I couldn’t name a single song, and I’ve never Spotify’d them to investigate.
What the hell did Counting Crows do to me to deserve my abandoning them so completely? Did they insult my spouse? Abuse my children? Vote for Trump? Nope. They just seem to have lost their glow.
One minute, they’re one of the bands that cemented the relationship between my girlfriend — the woman who would become my wife — and I. Lawdy, the year I tended bar, I practically broke the jukebox playing songs from August. Later, as I toiled away at a middle of nowhere newspaper in the middle of nowhere in Georgia, the Crows were a constant companion in my car. And then, after one more album… I was just done.
Ultimately, even really amazing bands can be judged primarily on the quality and weight of their first three albums. You would be hard-pressed to name more than a handful of the rock immortals whose greatness was not fully measured and on display by the third album. Fleetwood Mac, perhaps. Journey, if you even consider them immortal. Depeche Mode or Genesis, if you’re really pushing the definition. Sure, Petty and Springsteen and U2 and countless others put out masterworks beyond their first three studio albums, but true greatness was already there for the listening.
That’s how I think of Counting Crows now, as a band whose first three albums alone make them more than worthy of being considered an amazing band… even if I lack interest in seeing where they went afterwards.
Below is the deepest kind of cut and the last Counting Crows song in the timeline of my eardrums. Originally a hidden bonus track tucked after minutes of silence at the end of the last song on This Desert Life, “Kid Things” is everything great about the band and their music.
YEAR: 1999
