Counting Crows

One for sorrow, two for joy

Three for girls, and four for boys

Five for silver, six for gold

Seven for a secret never to be told

It's 1992, and Geffen Records is still nursing the hangover from the dizzying success of "Nevermind" by Nirvana, an album the label had predicted would sell at most 250,000 copies. The commercial peak of grunge is practically just around the corner. "It's the rustle of fresh money, it's the sound of the underground finally making cash," Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt reportedly said when asked to define the rising phenomenon.

Amid the Generation X of the early Nineties, tearing apart its soul and vocal cords, there's also someone who prefers to cradle his own torments in the privacy of a bedroom, wiping away tears with the sleeves of a baggy sweater, like the one worn by Adam Duritz, a thirty-year-old from Maryland adopted by the San Francisco Bay Area, where he grew up as an artist. Surprisingly, in this space for romantic losers, one can also speak the language of tradition, of Van Morrison and The Band, of an unfashionable roots-rock that seemed to have already given its all after the revival of the early Eighties, a brief, physiological reaction to the prevailing new wave current (Tom Petty, John Mellencamp, John Fogerty, T Bone Burnett).

In the year of "Nevermind", Counting Crows, with no releases yet to their name, have in hand only a collection of demos, half of which will go on to form, in more elaborate guise, their recording debut. Before long these demos reach the ears of the American industry, and Counting Crows find themselves able to choose between six labels for their first record deal. In the end - who knows why - the decision falls on Geffen, which in September 1993 will release an album that goes on to sell over 7 million copies. On the amber-toned cover, a handwritten manuscript reveals the lyrics of a song that, despite being the title track, will be left off the record, only to be released twenty-five years later.

"August And Everything After" is an album that doesn't reject radio-friendly sound, but accepts compromises only as long as they don't cross a predetermined line. A case in point is its willingness to communicate through pauses and silences, like the nearly ten-second one that opens the album's first track. T Bone Burnett's production steeps the sound in small-town America and Appalachia (hammond organ, banjo, mandolins, accordions), while Duritz's words populate the lyrics with landscapes that are sometimes urban and sometimes rural, but always desolate.

In the opening "Round Here" - a song built on the halting gait of a guitar line, masterfully performed in the famous live rendition on the David Letterman Show - a man walks out his front door like a ghost, throwing himself into the fog, "where no one notices the contrast between white and white" and "the fine line between right and wrong." This man will meet a woman who's come from Nashville with a suitcase in hand, precariously balanced between the idea of imitating Elvis, understanding Jesus, or taking her own life by jumping from who knows how many floors up.

This is Duritz's poetics, poised between real and surreal, and it's excruciating. It expresses itself through descriptions, streams of consciousness and direct speech from characters who at times represent the author's own alter ego, and at other times people who shared a part of his life, as in the autobiographical "Anna Begins," a ballad of chiaroscuro tones that recounts the brief relationship between the Counting Crows singer and an Australian woman he met in Greece, during a holiday on a半-deserted island. The minor-key verses open up into the major-key chorus, just as dark clouds - that is, the fear of reason, aware of an impossible relationship - dissolve as the sun's rays filter through - namely, the passion that sweeps everything away in its whirling course.

Aside from the lead single, "Mr. Jones," a hit for an entire generation (and perhaps more), there are no anthems on "August And Everything After," only tremors and vibrations of a soul slowly disintegrating, second by second. The passing of time in "Time And Time Again" seems incapable of soothing an unbearable abandonment: "I picture you walking backwards to get the feeling you were heading home," sings Duritz in the first verse, while drums and guitars float over Charlie Gillingham's hammond organ carpet, the album's defining instrument. The track treads on slowcore ground, where one can spot the fingerprints of Mark Eitzel and Mark Kozelek, as in the magnificent "Ghost Train," the album's peak, a blurred photograph of a train filled with ghosts - that is, memories - crammed into ever more numerous carriages, as they race along the tracks of a time (time again...) that moves too fast.

In these desolate places of the soul and of America, the only consolation hides in those brief moments between sleep and waking recounted by "Perfect Blue Building," where Adam Duritz's mind wanders through a dreamlike Berkeley, among spectral buildings and residential areas, like the maze of houses winding between Virginia Street and La Loma Avenue. Nothing catastrophic, just the tremendous horror of a life extinguished and without purpose, where the only redeeming escape seems to be the one that leads away from oneself. And yet for Duritz, even just getting away from the San Francisco Bay seems impossible. "Sullivan Street" - with piano, clean electric guitar and female backing vocals from Maria McKee - tells of the long journey from the hills around Berkeley down to San Mateo, crossing the bridge on Highway 92, the one that leads home to Susan, one of Duritz's many loves.

The minimalist "Raining In Baltimore" and the lush "Omaha" represent the album's zenith and nadir: the former an intimate voice-and-piano ballad, the latter a roots-rock anthem echoing country and Celtic music, recalling the atmospheres of The Band and the novels of Mark Twain: somewhere, sings Duritz, deep in the American heartland, "color slides in with the summer rain, a girl out in the fields is starting to change, and a new love is born." Rain as tears in Baltimore, rain as purification in Omaha, and rain as a symbol of prestige and spirituality in "Rain King," a driving pop-rock number in the style of R.E.M., inspired by Henderson, the protagonist of one of the most famous novels by Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1976.

Despite its strongly intimate and autobiographical content - it's no coincidence that Adam Duritz was born in August 1964 - "August And Everything After" is an album that never grows flat, but keeps pressing forward thanks to Duritz's own delivery - theatrical, yet also prone to wander into soul territory - to the irony of the lyrics and to the literary references, born of the frontman's academic background, which make the Counting Crows' debut not merely a diary of generational self-pity, but also a kind of small almanac of American culture. The band's very name comes from a widely known nursery rhyme among English-speaking communities, blending superstition and folklore, summing up the popular legend according to which the number of crows appearing in a given circumstance is, depending on the case, an omen of good or bad fortune.

The image painted by Duritz's lyrics in the electric rock of the closing "A Murder Of One" - which anticipates the sound of the following album, "Recovering The Satellites" - recalls an Impressionist painting: "I dreamed I saw you walking up a hill in the snow, casting shadows on the winter sky, as you stood there counting crows: one for sorrow, two for joy, three for girls and four for boys, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told."

"August And Everything After" is, in short, an album that communicates on two levels: the autobiographical, and thus more universal one, able to dig deep into the listener by summoning moments of lived experience, and the folkloric, and thus more territorial one, able to portray - through music and words - slices of an urban and rural America that, for many, exists only in the imagination.

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13/04/2025