30 Years Later, One Overplayed Album Is Now A Legit Classic
Story by Ryan Britt •If you were in middle school or high school in the 1990s, there’s a good chance you had conflicting feelings about Counting Crows. Calling them a cool band in the way that Nirvana or Pearl Jam were cool never felt right. But like so many things about ‘90s pop culture, the prevalence and persistence of a thing prevented you from questioning whether or not you should or shouldn’t consume certain kinds of music. With most huge albums, you simply didn’t have a choice, those albums consumed you whether you liked it or not.
August and Everything After from the Counting Crows is like that; an album that you heard constantly in the early ‘90s, so much so that probably didn’t question whether or not you actually liked it or not. But, the truth is, thirty years after this record hit on September 14, 1993, August and Everything After is actually way better than you might remember.
Thanks to poppy ear-worm singles from their later albums like “Accidentally in Love” (2004), and “American Girls” (2002), some younger folks might not be aware that the first Counting Crows album opens with a song about worrying about suicide and hating your job. Yes, it’s possible that “Round Here,” is still the greatest Counting Crows song of them all, and that’s partly because the frontman Adam Duritz actually conceived and wrote it for a previous band called The Himalayans. But just like Shirley Manson needed to leave Angelfish to join Garbage, Adam Duritz was destined to reboot “Round Here” for Counting Crows. While this song was never a hit single because it's the first track on August and Everything After, it’s status as a dorm-room anthem was instant in 1993.
If you got into Counting Crows after the early aughts, returning to August and Everything After was probably a revelation. Are these the same guys who covered “Big Yellow Taxi?” Wait, is this the greatest album for sad teenagers or frustrated twenty-somethings ever? The answer is yes and yes, but the album might hit even better in your 30s or 40s.
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