33

Mr. Jones
Counting Crows
1993

Oh man. What am I going to say about the Crows?  Well the first thing I will say is that 22-year-old Jason would’ve gone completely apoplectic about the Counting Crows being way down into the 30s of this list (there was a lot of fire in the belly in those days). 

Let me paint this picture for y’all:  I was obsessed with this band. And I mean, *obsessed.* Not quite at the level of putting a poster of the latest heartthrob from Tiger Beat on my wall, but close. I absolutely loved the debut album when it came out in high school, and then I remember one of my fellow missionaries telling me on the dusty streets of Oaxaca about how good the follow up album was (I knew about A Long December and Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox before I even got back to the States). The music was just right up my alley:  folksy.  Acoustic-y.  Catchy.  I was all in.

So when I returned in the summer of ‘98, the matchstick had been lit. It was also around this time that music blogs started popping up. And I ate those up for the Crows. I would literally read multiple fan blogs daily (guys, I was a journalism major, not an applied mathematics major).  I remember telling my brother that frontman Adam Duritz was “a poet.”  And it didn’t help that they released an awesome double live album at this time, one side acoustic and the other electric, which I thought was the coolest thing ever done (Across a Wire still holds up as amazing). 

Fast forward to December 1999. I’ve now been married for six months, and the Crows come to Salt Lake for my first opportunity to see them live. Well, they sorta came to SLC, they played this absolute dump of a venue in Magna, Utah, called Saltair which is incredibly still around. Anyways, I *brought a 3x5 index card and a pen* and wrote down all of the songs so that I could….tell the blog moderators, I guess?  Good grief, how embarrassing. Don’t ever let people tell you I’m not fun at parties, y’all. 

So, yeah, I loved the Counting Crows. Still love 'em!  I think my buddy Sean is the only other dude who still loves them as much as I do, although as far as I know he never wrote down the songs from any of his Crows shows on an index card. I haven’t even really touched on this song itself, but you all know it. The one that started it all, and was an absolute massive hit.  Still great. Say what you want about Adam Duritz and his ridiculous dreads and how he bagged all the famous actresses of the day, but the man was a brilliant songwriter and great frontman. Even if I won’t go so far as to call him a poet now. 

Other Songs Considered:
Raining in Baltimore, Catapult, A Murder of One, Have You Seen Me Lately?, A Long December, Einstein on the Beach (For An Eggman)