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Recovering The Satellites - Album Overview

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Recovering The Satellites - Album Overview

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The thing about August and Everything After is that it worked almost too well.

Adam was pretty vocal about struggling with their meteoric rise through fame. "There are, like, intense amounts of people that know very personal things about me," ... "The repercussions of it are pretty weird."

And all this was before the time of tabloids. Bro had a sad girl era for a while. He got some serious hate mail and ended up leaving San Francisco to go to Los Angeles, and he actually worked at Johnny Dep's bar for a while because he only felt normal surrounded by people more famous than him. He also just straight up stopped writing.

"Part of the reason I didn't write was because I knew that the songs were the problem," he said in an interview at the time. "You need to write, do the songs, get a record contract, become famous — and your life falls apart. That made me very bitter for a time."

"Have You Seen Me Lately?" ended up being the song to snap him out of his funk, so it deserves all the flowers. Recovering The Satellites brought on a new producer - Gil Norton, who worked with the Pixies- and they also brought on a new guitarist.

I personally love that they named it after a satellite that's lost its signal, drifting, and the work of actually recovering it.

Notable Record Mentions:

No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in the US, No. 4 in the UK, and No. 7 in Australia

Adam pretty frequently calls is his favorite Counting Crows record

Some cool additional readings:

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/adam-s-angst-1.103914

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YOU expect a guy who titles his new album Recovering The Satellites to be a bit of a spacer, right? But you don’t expect him …

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August And Everything After - Amazon Original

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August And Everything After - Amazon Original

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Counting Crows - August & Everything After (2019)

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Richard Manuel Is Dead (If I Could Give All My Love)

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Richard Manuel Is Dead (If I Could Give All My Love)

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Richard Manuel Is Dead (Live At Heineken Music Hall/2003)

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Counting Crows - Palisades Park (Official)

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Adam Duritz had been playing in the Bay Area for years with other bands (Sordid Humor and the Himalayans), and then he started doing acoustic duos with guitarist David Bryson. Adam was more focused on The Himalayans, but "Dave" and he were experimenting with a new sound on the side. That'd eventually go on to be the core of Counting Crows.

A lot of Duritz's early work focused on feeling lonely and the particular ache of being young and STUCK.

The band signed to Geffen Records and recorded the album early in 1993 with producer T-Bone Burnett, and the album was released in September of that year.

On anuary 15, 1994, Counting Crows played Saturday Night Live. It was their first major national television appearance! They performed "Round Here." I made a separate mini post just for this.

The sound of the album is arguably one of their hardest to place in the discography. They used pedal steel, accordions, mandolins, harmonicas... basically nothing that normally goes with rock.

The album was named after Adam Duritz, who was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in August 1964.

Notable Charting Mentions:

Charted on Billboard 200 for 93 weeks with a peak of No. 4

Rolling Stone ranked it at #67 on their list of 100 Best Albums of the 90's

Sold more than 7 million copies in the U.S.

They received two Grammy nominations in 1994 (Best Rock Performance by a Duo/Group with Vocal for "Round Here", and Best New Artist)

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A Conversation with Adam Duritz | ROUTE Magazine

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Adam Duritz, front man of the American rock band Counting Crows who brought us hits like Mr. Jones, A Long December among others, shares on dealing with fame, mental health, and the loss of his iconic dreadlocks.

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This song dates back to Duritz's days in The Himalayans. The band wrote the music, and then Duritz would write and add lyrics. It became their most popular song at concerts, and when he formed Counting Crows, he brought it with him. "Round Here" has eight different composer credits, since he wanted to ensure his old band mates and new ones, too, all got credit.

It was the first song Counting Crows ever performed on Saturday Night Live, and that performance sparked their popularity.

"This is a song about me," (Adam, during the Counting Crows VH1 Storytellers appearance). "The song begins with a guy walking out the front door of his house and leaving behind this woman. But the more he begins to leave people behind in his life, the more he feels like he's leaving leaving himself behind as well, and the less substantial he feels about himself. That's sort of what the song's about: even as he disappears from the lives of people, he's disappearing more and more from his own life."

The chorus ("round here we always stand up straight") is the rule he's fighting against. The things you're told as a kid that if you follow them, you'll add up to something. They're the lessons your mother told you, the child lessons that were supposed to guarantee you'd become someone.

The theme of childhood promises not panning out is one that shows up a lot in Duritz' lyrics.

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Counting Crows - Round Here (Official Music Video)

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Counting Crows - American Girls ft. Sheryl Crow

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Counting Crows - She Don't Want Nobody Near

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Counting Crows - Virginia Through The Rain (Official Audio)

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"This song is about the difficulty in having faith in things, and finding things to have faith in — in yourself, in God, in a woman. Faith is a weird thing. In a sense it is all about waiting. It's not actually about getting anything. Faith is about the wait, because once you get something, there's no need anymore. So a lot about faith is just the willingness to throw yourself on a fence and hang there for a while."

This song was actually the offspring of a different song: "When I Dream of Michelangelo". He started writing it in 1990, but just never finished it. For Recovering The Satellites, he ended up drawing inspiration from it for both this song as well as Goodnight Elizabeth. The line "I dream of Michelangelo when I'm lying in my bed" is a direct survivor from that earlier work!

"I keep saying, 'All my sins — I said that I would pay for them if I could come back to you.' It's not just about finding things to believe in. It's about wanting to be able to believe in anything, too. And it's about all the voices that get inside your head and whisper for you to do it or not do it."

I love the way he describes those little mental voices of doubt and guilt as "angels of the silences".

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Counting Crows - Miami (New Amsterdam - Live At Heineken Music Hall)(audio)

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Fun fact: This video was basically scrubbed from existence! Supposedly, SNL wanted CC to shorten it for the live broadcast since they were a relatively untested band.

Counting Crows refused, and Adam did the pettiest thing EVER by dragging out the end of the song to make it last longer than normal. SNL ended up using the rehearsal footage, so it was equally petty.

Adam reflecting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwqKG6wIEQ0

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115K views · 42K reactions | “Round Here” Live from SNL 1994 | Counting Crows

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Sullivan Street (Live At Hammerstein Ballroom, New York/1997)

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"Maria"- A note on this recurring character

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"Maria"- A note on this recurring character

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You're going to keep running into her.

Maria appears in "Round Here," briefly in "Mr. Jones," in the later song "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby," in the unreleased title track for August and Everything After, and in at least two songs Duritz wrote before Counting Crows even existed. She is the most discussed figure in the band's entire lore. There are Reddit threads, a Wikipedia page, and a published investigative article dedicated entirely to who she is. The girl has herself a fan base.

Adam Duritz has said that "It's the one character that for the most part is not a real person. In a lot of ways, she is a representation of everything that made me want to write songs." .... "She's just an idea of someone I came up with when I was writing 'Round Here.' I mean, she's me. It's through the eyes of a girl, but it's someone very much like me struggling at the edge, not sure if she's going to fall off on one side or the other. It's a theme that's stuck through songs. So she keeps popping up."

He's also said, "I think originally it also had a lot to do with Maria McKee, who was a friend of mine and an idol of mine at the time. She was a labelmate at Geffen. She sings all over August and Everything After."

Keep track of Maria's lyrics! The most famous is probably "There's a piece of Maria in every song that I sing."

An extensive investigation by a journalist at 801 Magazine (he interviewed Adam's close friends, including the real Mr. Jones himself) ended without a definitive answer. He wrote that in the end, the myth of Maria may be "lovelier than the awful truth," and that perhaps "it is better to leave such things alone."

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This was their first big hit, the one that put them on the radio and on MTV and into the zeitgeist. And the story behind it is SO fucking unglamorous, it's kind of funny.

Duritz and his friend Marty Jones (his band's bassist at the time) had gone to see Marty's father play. His dad was one of the only Americans ever to have a successful career as a flamenco guitarist in Spain, performing under the name David Serva in Madrid. He was in San Francisco playing with his old flamenco troupe, so after the show, they all went out drinking. Later in the night, Duritz spotted Chris Isaak's drummer sitting in a corner booth with three women. "So Marty and I were like, 'We gotta get our shit together. We can't even talk to girls.' I went home that night and wrote the song."

But throughout the song, it's clear that Adam wants you to see through that.

"You're supposed to see through that guy: 'When everybody loves me, I'll never be lonely.' You're supposed to know that's not true. For one thing, there's no such thing as 'everybody loves me' — nobody knows you in that case. But you still want it. You want life to be easier. You want to be a rock star so it's easier to talk to a girl. It's the same crazy person sitting there with the girl later, though. So it doesn't fix things."

This song is a remark on fame. Such good fucking commentary. It's also about the dream and knowing the dream is a lie at the same time.

One small production note worth knowing: the band's drummer at the time hated the song, thought it sounded like country music, and kept ruining take after take. (Producer) T-Bone Burnett eventually brought in a session drummer who nailed it in two takes.

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Counting Crows - Mr. Jones (Official Music Video)

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It's absolutely criminal that there was never a proper music video for this song. It wasn't even a single.

There is a real Anna, actually. Duritz met her while vacationing in Greece in 1989, long before he was even remotely famous. He saved up money doing landscaping work to afford the trip. At the end of the vacation, they agreed there was no way for their relationship to continue, and went their separate ways.

"She's Anna. You don't know her. She's in Australia. But she's every girl you ever felt that way about, too."

The song is about denial in real time, and sort of struggling to face a fate that you know is approaching and cannot escape.

"It's about denial — how far you'll go to deny that something's really happening because it's too complicated, too terrifying, too difficult. It's about all the things you go through trying to squash your feelings, to sort of shut it down, and how much you can hurt other people and yourself by doing that."

Structurally, the narrator keeps insisting that he's not worried, and says it over and over again.

I am not worried. I am not overly concerned.

Eventually, it gets to the end of the song, and he can't even say it anymore.

Oh lord, I'm not ready for this sort of thing.

By the end, you realize that he's not actually talking about the relationship (and hasn't been for the entire song), but that he's been preparing himself for losing it.

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Yet another beautiful fan favorite with no real music video.

Adam moved constantly as a kid and never developed a strong sense of being from any one place. He always explained the line:

fifty miles east of Baltimore

"When I'm fifty miles east of Baltimore, it's like fifty miles east of where I come from, which is blank to me. I don't know where that is. It's a way of being lost."

Duritz was eventually diagnosed with a dissociative disorder, a condition that makes the world feel unreal, as though things aren't quite happening. He pretty frequently describes it as feeling "untethered"..."because nothing seems real, it's hard to connect with the world or the people in it because they're not there. You're not there."

There's a fan account, passed down through Songfacts, that has a pretty bold claim that this song was never supposed to be on the album at all. The actual title track was meant to be included, but they couldn't get it right in the studio. Duritz sat down at the piano during a break, played this song he'd written for a friend, did it in a single take, and the rest of the band immediately said it was going on the record. While the title song for August and Everything After is a whole other issue, the biggest thing about Raining in Baltimore is that it sort of sets the stage for Adam to play with unique twists on tangible things throughout the rest of their discography.

Rain isn't really rain, distance isn't really miles, etc.

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On VH1 Storytellers:

"I read this book in college at Berkeley called Henderson the Rain King, and the main character was kind of this big, open-wound of a person, Eugene Henderson. He just sort of bled all over everyone around him — for better or for worse, full of joy, full of sorrow."

Adam said he wrote this after watching Doctor Zhivago at home one night and it got to him so deeply that he took about forty minutes and wrote Rain King. It has nothing to do with Doctor Zhivago. Dude's brain is just wired differently, lol.

Personally, this is one of my favorite songs of all time from them. He wants heaven, but heaven for him is "faith and sex and God" all tangled together. He wants everything, and he knows he deserves something, but just doesn't know how to get there. The lyric "I belong in the service of the Queen / I belong anywhere but in between" has this refusal of the middle ground in that line. I always interpreted it as a strained demand for something grander and stranger than ordinary life, but the singer is also aware that it could just never happen.

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The band name comes from "One for Sorrow," a British divination nursery rhyme about the superstitious counting of magpies. Adam Duritz heard about it in the film Signs of Life, which starred his close friend, actress Mary-Louise Parker. The rhyme goes: One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret, never to be told.

"I can remember being eight years old and having infinite possibilities. But life ends up being so much less than we thought it would be when we were kids, with relationships that are so empty and stupid and brutal. If you don't find a way to break the chain and change in some way, then you wind up, as the rhyme goes: a murder of one — for sorrow."

Since a "Murder" is the collective noun for a group of crows and a murder of one is a crow alone, this song is talking about the worst possible outcome, according to the rhyme and according to this album. This song in particular is saying that you can't be that person alone, because you have to change, or you'll be stuck forever.

Personally, I always thought it was so powerful in a way to name his band after the thing he was the most afraid of becoming (Someone who never changes).

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The Lost Song: August and Everything After

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The Lost Song: August and Everything After

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On at the original album cover, underneath the image, behind the text, there is handwriting. Those are the original lyrics to a song called "August and Everything After", which was the song the album was named after. The song was supposedly never finished, never recorded, never produced, NADA.

"I was born in August. The record was about everything that happened after that. I loved the title more than I liked the song, quite honestly. But we did include some of my handwritten lyrics on the cover since I didn't want to include anything we were actually using."

In December 2003, the band tried to play it live at the Warfield in San Francisco. Adam thought it was "kind of meh", but a bootleg copy ended up circulating for years in the fan community. They tried again later at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Adam actually lost the original cassette of the demo and had to go online and ask fans to send him an MP3 so he could remember his own lyrics. Lol.

"Putting a song you can't actually hear on the front of the record is good for mystery and mythmaking."

It's out, and you'll hear it eventually. I'm saving it for later for a reason! :)

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august and everything after counting crows

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A fucking BANGER. No official music video. My personal cross to bear against this band forevermore.

"It is difficult to deal with it. If you're a guy who writes about what you're going through in life, you can't not write about going through that if it happens. It was just such a weird thing to go from being a pretty shy, private person to being on the cover of magazine stands. I wasn't really prepared for that — especially because I was already kind of unbalanced, and that really set it off."

There's this idea of dislocation after you're famous, and with

"people's assumption that they know who you are after you're famous, and that you are this thing they think you are, as opposed to who you are. It's not just the fame, but also all the assumptions that come with it."

"dealing with the relationships with people in the wake of fame — how I felt about knowing whether they were real or not real, and my perceptions of my social life having exploded out across the radio."

So many good quotes about this song. This is the direct sequel to "Mr. Jones.", in my mind, with Jones saying "I want to be a rock star." and HYSML? saying "Girl, hell no. Here's what that actually felt like."

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Counting Crows - Boxcars (Official Audio)

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Goodnight Elisabeth (Live At Heineken Music Hall/2003)

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I'm Not Sleeping (Live At Hammerstein Ballroom, New York/1997)

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Counting Crows - God Of Ocean Tides (Lyric Video)

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Counting Crows - Under The Aurora (Official Music Video)

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The liner notes on Recovering the Satellites dedicate this song as "For Sean & Me." The Sean in question is Sean Penn. Duritz wrote "Miller's Angels" for Penn's 1994 film The Crossing Guard after Penn came to New York and screened it for him.

The way he almost did a movie: https://www.audacy.com/national/music/counting-crows-adam-duritz-almost-starred-in-this-90s-film

But the song never made it into the film. "I got so frustrated with how Harvey Weinstein was treating Sean Penn when we were working on The Crossing Guard that I pulled 'Miller's Angels' off of the movie."

So why is it still dedicated to Sean Penn? Because Adam told an interviewer (this was the Irish Times article I linked at the start of this section) that around this time that people would start approaching him on the street looking to provoke a reaction, "saying really vile things," wanting him to lose his temper so they could profit from it.

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Counting Crows - Possibility Days (Audio)

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"A Long December"... the greatest song Counting Crows has ever written, if we believe the magazine American Songwriter.

"In the middle of December of '95, my friend Jennifer got run over by a car, just creamed. And I spent that whole month — while we were just beginning the record — and most of January and February in the hospital. Each morning and early afternoon I'd go to the studio, the house where we were recording, and we'd play all afternoon and all night."

"I knew that was the best thing I'd ever written when I wrote it," (He said in 2025). "I knew it was a perfect song, and I knew I was going to love playing it forever."

To me, this song isn't hope exactly because it's just too messy for that. It feels more like the stubborn superstitious (slightly foolish/naive) act of allowing yourself to want things to be better, even when you have no evidence they will be. Or worse, you've got evidence to the contrary.

One pop culture footnote: the woman in the music video is Courteney Cox, whom Duritz met on the set of Friends and dated for a time.

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Counting Crows - A Long December (Official Video)