My brother-in-law Gavin set me the impossible task of trying to pick my 10 most influential albums. It has taken me a lot of mental energy to narrow it down to these 10 albums. I know the initial premise of it is to do the album covers without comment, I am not able to do that and feel I need to justify every entry into the list. So I’m going to do one blog post a day for the next 10 days with a short bit about why each album made it onto the list. And because I can’t pick favourites, these are in chronological order of release. I tried to do autobiographical like in High Fidelity but my brain can’t pick apart what I heard first.
Band: Counting Crows
Album: August and Everything After
Released: 14 September 1993
Favourite Track: A Murder of One
Favourite Lyric: “Every word is nonsense but I understand”
The first time I heard Counting Crows was on the MTV when the M still stood for music. There was this cool looking guy with dreads singing poetic lyrics and I was hooked. I would have been in my early teens and probably at my most influenceable.
I got the album on a casette tape and probably wore it out. It became my favourite album for quite a while. It was less loud than the music which I thought I liked at the time – louder, rockier or punkier kind of stuff and showed me that there was a place for gentle melodies, pretty guitars and sometimes heart felt lyrics, often poetic lyrics.
This album has appeared in the lists of many others doing the same thing. I think it somehow must have struck a chord with people at the right time, even though listening back to it now, the songs haven’t dated and are really quite timeless.
Out of all the bands on my 10 most influential albums list, they are one of two that I have not seen live, and the other will not be possible for me to see. I might look to try and rectify that when music starts happening again.
Like many bands, the album that first gets you into them is the one that sticks with you and that is definitely the case for Counting Crows. Whilst there are songs on other albums that I like more than many on August and Everything After, this album is the one that resonates most.