Published on May 7, 2004
Counting Crows shouldn’t work.
A band born in the grungy/trendy ’90s, playing retrophile music
of daring integrity and artistry. A band that so frankly revolves
around one individual — singer/songwriter Adam Duritz — and yet
builds rather than loses a collective musical identity over time. A
band that nearly drowned under the tidal wave of praise that
swamped their first album, then resurfaced at three-year intervals
with three more albums, each both brilliant and flawed, each a
courageous effort to further the band’s musical growth.
It shouldn’t work, but it does.
In the liner notes to this superb — yet, once again, slightly
flawed — collection, scribe Bill Flanagan narrates a revealing
anecdote. In a casual conversation about Olympic medals, Duritz
allowed that he’d never be satisfied with a bronze medal — he’d
want the gold. After someone pointed out he was really shooting for
platinum anyway, he clarified that it wasn’t about record sales. It
was about “making something great.”
Evidence abounds here that Duritz and the Crows have made
something great together, many times over. Sometimes the evidence
is in the organic yet elegant way an entire song fits together,
like the furious lament “Angels Of The Silences,” the slickly
ironic “American Girls” or the raucous slackers’ anthem
“Hanginaround.” And sometimes the evidence is in the details. The
eerie arrangement and somber cadence of “Round Here.” The luminous
tone of the piano in “A Long December” as Duritz sings about “the
way that light attaches to a girl.” The bounding bass line that
anchors the band’s buoyant cover of Joni Mitchell’s classic “Big
Yellow Taxi.”
Or lyrics like this one, from “Anna Begins”: “She’s talking in
her sleep / It’s keeping me awake / and Anna begins to toss and
turn / And every word is nonsense but I understand.” Sleeplessness,
the emotional gulf between men and women, and the intuitive
recognition that a relationship has begun to unravel — all in a
brief little quatrain from an unjustifiably obscure “pop” song.
(One other lyric note — this collection’s title is taken from one
of Duritz’ best lines, from the opening verse of “Mrs. Potter’s
Lullaby,” a seven-minute ode to a movie-screen crush: “If dreams
are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts.” Simply
brilliant.)
As always in a “best of” situation, however, the
more-than-casual fan is left second-guessing some of the track
selections. From
Hard Candy, why include the languid ballad “Holiday In
Spain,” one of that album’s lesser achievements, over the
sparkling, propulsive title track? A head-shaker, that one, though
still not as puzzling as this: how do you justify including two new
tracks (both solid, neither a standout) while omitting what is
arguably the Crows’ finest moment as a band, the ringing,
gut-wrenching conclusion to their debut album, “A Murder Of
One”?
The thing is, these flaws are part of what makes Counting Crows
such a special group. They remind us that neither greatness nor
beauty is the same thing as perfection. By my measurement, this
album contains some of the best and most important songs of the
last decade of popular music. Compared to its competition, it rates
an “A+” cubed. But this band isn’t competing with anyone but
themselves, and if they’re not satisfied yet — if they are still
driven to “create something great” — why on earth would I want to
contradict them?