COUNTING CROWS

STORYteLLERS:

Angels of the Silences

I write quite a few songs where the sort of issue is faith--having faith, keeping faith. And this song in particular is about the difficulty in having faith in things, and finding things to have faith in, in yourself, in God, in like he said, a woman. Faith is a weird thing, it in a sense it is all about waiting. It's not actually about getting anything, you know, faith is about the wait, because once you get something there is no need anymore. So a lot about faith is just the willingness to sort of throw yourself on a fence and hang there for a while. That's a very difficult and bitter thing, you know. In this song, I keep saying the main character, *I*, I said, "All my sins, 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 to do it as well. And it's called "Angels of the Silences."

A long december

"In the middle of December of ‘95 my friend Jennifer got run over by a car, and just creamed; and I spent that whole month, while we were just beginning the record and most of Jan & Feb in the hospital, each like, morning and early afternoon then I'd go to the studio, the house where we were recording, and we'd play all afternoon and all night ... and uh ... it was a very weird time because ya know, there is a lot of stress ; not that it's a big deal being a second album, but any album. There just not that easy to make...ya know .. It's a very stressful process, and especially when you're first starting out.. and uh ... and like I said, I spent a lot of time in the hospital which is pretty weird .. Um...

"But one day I just left the studio about 2 in the morning, and I went to my friend Samantha and Tracy's house which is Hillside Manor; and uh.. That's what we call it anyway, it's just a little house...and uh..I sat there talking with them, I woke ‘em up, got ‘em out of bed and made ‘em talk to me for a couple hours, then I went home to my house. "And I wrote this song between about 4 and 6 and then uh ...went to the hospital the next day, and came to the house and I played it for the guys before dinner and ...and taught it to them after dinner. And we played it about 6 or 7 times ..and ..do you remember which take number it was? Take number 6. We just stopped, that was it. We recorded the song, it was done. We all went in to the kitchen and had a cold beer, I grabbed Brad our engineer and ran back out about 5min later, had him play the tape three times, just recorded all the harmonies ...and uh..we've never touched it since, that was it. It's a completely live song except for the harmonies. "It's a song about looking back on your life and seeing changes happening, and for once for me, looking forward and thinking...ya know...things are gonna change for the better ‘maybe this year will be better than the last' and uh...and so, like a lot of songs on the end of album it's not about everything turning out great, but it at least is about hope...and the possibilities ..." A.D. (Song starts)

Round Here

"The first way Counting Crows ever sounded, it was me and Dave in bars and coffee houses playing open mics, doing this song this way. "The song begins with a guy walking out the front door of his house, and leaving behind this woman..and uh... but the more he begins to leave people behind in his life, the more he feels like he's leaving himself behind as well... and um.. the less and less substantial he feels like he's becoming to himself... and that's sorta what the song's about because he feels that even as he disappears from the lives of people, he's disappearing more and more from his own life. "And uh, the chorus is, he sorta keeps sort of screaming out these idioms these sort of lessons that your mother might say to you when you were a kid, sort of child lessons ya know ‘round here we always stand up straight'..um..'carving out our names'; things that you're told when you're a kid are the things that ‘you do these things, and when you're grown up it'll add up to something' ya know... you'll have a job, you'll have a life and, I think for me and for the character in the song, they don't add up to anything. It's just a bunch of crap kind of.. um.. your life comes to you or it doesn't come to you, but, those things, they didn't really mean anything. "And then, by the end of the song he's so dismayed by this that he's sort of screaming out that he get to stay up as late as he wants, and Nobody makes him wait... the sort of things that are important if you're a kid, ya know.. that you don't have to go to bed, you don't have to do anything; but the sort of things that, they don't make any difference at all when you're an adult, they're nothing...and uh...this is a song about... about me. And it's called Round Here..." A.D.

Mr. Jones

This is a song that has been misinterpreted greatly, to say the least. I think people too often look for symbolism in songs when they're simpler than they seem. This, in particular, is much simpler than it must seem to a lot of people. I have heard everything from it being about some ancient blues man who taught me to play music, which is completely ridiculous (but like somebody's movie fantasy). And I've also heard it's about my dick, which is even more ridiculous. Why do people go there, you know?

When we did the interview for "Rolling Stone" I walked with David Wilde into the [museum name] in Paris one day and the first thing that happened was these two kids ran up to us and said, "Hey! You're the guy from Counting Crows, right?" And I said, 'yeah.' And he said, "Is Mr. Jones about your dick?" I wanted to kill the guy because I knew where that was going to end up, which is the first paragraph of the article in "Rolling Stone."

It's really a song about my friend Marty and I. We went out one night to watch his dad play, his dad was a flamenco guitar player who lived in Spain, and he was in San Francisco in the mission playing with his old flamenco troupe. And after the gig we all went to this bar called the New Amsterdam in San Francisco on Columbus and we got completely drunk. And Marty and I sat at the bar staring at these two girls, wishing there was *some* way we could go talk to them, but we were, we were too shy. And we thought, we kept joking with each other, that if we were big rock stars instead of such loser, low-budget musicians, we'd be able to, this would be easy. And I went home that night and I wrote a song about it.

And I joke about what's it about, that story. But it's really a song about all the dreams and all the things that make you want to go in to , you know, doing whatever it is that like seizes your heart, whether it's being a rock star or being a doctor or whatever it is, you know. And I mean, those things run from like 'all this stuff I have pent up inside of me' to , 'I want to meet girls' you know, because I'm tired of not being able to.

And it is a lot of those things, it's about all those dreams. But it's also kind of cautionary because it's about how misguided you may be about some of those things and how hollow they may be too. Like the character in the song keeps saying, 'When everybody loves me I will never be lonely.' And you're supposed to know that that's not the way it's gonna be, probably. I knew that even then. And this is a song about my dreams.

Rain King

I read this book in college when I was at Berkeley called "Henderson, the Rain King." And the main character in the book was kind of this big, open-wound of a person, Eugene Henderson, he just sot of bled all over everyone around him. For better or for worse, full of joy, full of sorrow, he just made a mess of everything. And when I wrote the song years later, it didn't really have anything to do with the book except the book had kind of become a totem for how I felt about creativity and writing--that it was just this thing where you just took everything inside of you and just sort of [funny noise] sprayed it all over everything, and not to worry too much about it. You try and craft it but not to be self-conscious about it, in any case. And, it's sort of a song about everything that goes into writing, all the feelings, everything that makes you want to write, makes you want to maybe pick up a guitar and do it, and express yourself because it's full of all the doubts and the fears about how I felt about my life at that time. And also the feeling that I really deserved something better than what I had accomplished up to that point. I think it *is* sort of a religious song about the sort of undefinable thing inside you or out there somewhere that makes you write, makes you create, makes you do any kind of art form, you know? And makes me the rain king, sort of.

Catapult

I guess it has been pretty well documented by now that during the touring process of "August," you know, I kinda flipped out for a while and we had to take a little time off the road. I was thinking about this the other day, there's, if there's one thing that really kind of sort of sent me spinning to begin with it was, it was when Kurt Cobain died. It was a pretty hectic time for us, we, the record, the beginning of April '94 had been in the top five for a few weeks. We, we had just played the "Letterman" show and played "Round Here." We went on this European tour and in the middle of the European tour in Paris we were supposed to meet David Wilde and Mark Selliger and do an interview and photos for the cover of "Rolling Stone." And I, I was really unsure about doing this because it just seemed like everything's getting really huge as it is, and that's something I'm kind of nervous about and it is it really such a great idea to have ourselves on the cover of every magazine stand in America, you know?

And, uh, but we agreed to it, you know, and as it led up to that day when we arrived in Paris I got kind of more and more uptight and nervous about this. We landed in Paris and before we even had the chance to talk to any reporters or do any photographs, we, we found, we heard that, that he had shot himself. And it really scared the hell out of me because I thought, these things in my life are getting so out of control and I'm, I'm so wondering if it's possible to handle all these changes as they happen. And then we found out that he was dead and I thought well, you know, maybe these things *aren't* something you can handle, maybe this is something that is just too difficult to deal with. And here we are about to shoot this cover, you know.

I think it really freaked me out because although fame can seem like something where you're surrounded by people all the time and it's really great and you're, you're always among friends and among people. The fact is that it can really wig you out and there can come a time when you feel like you're just completely and utterly alone. I thought that he must have just come to that point where he just was completely alone, and I really didn't want to get to that place myself. And about a year later when I was writing this song, it began as a song about, like so many other songs I wrote in this period of time, about just wanting to push everything back and frustratingly wanting to just make everything just stop. And I thought of *him* because I thought it's not, it's a horrible thing to have to come to that place and feels so alone because you wish you didn't have to, and you don't really want to. But, you find yourself there anyways. And it' s called "Catapult."

HYSML

There was a period when we were touring on the last album where it, it all became kind of a bit much to me and I wrote this song in the year following that. I kinda hesitated to put it on the album because sometimes I think songs like this can be a little trite. It seems like everybody who has a big record writes a song about how hard a time they're having. I think it's a little hard to get people to sympathize with that sometimes because it's like, 'oh, he's famous, poor, poor shmuck.' But the truth is that it's a weird thing, you know. All of a sudden the whole world's different. People look at you differently, people treat you differently. You know, if you woke up on Mars, you'd have trouble with the gravity too, for a little while. You adjust, I, I adjusted.

But there is a period where I had a really hard time. One of the things that happens is that you have all these big things that happen to you in your life when this sort of things that happens to us happens. And you begin to pile up big experiences, but I think sometimes, you don't get to keep any of the little ones that are really important. Like in the song the person says, 'I remember all the little things that make up a memory, like she said she loved to watch me sleep, like she said, it's the breathing, it's the breathing in and out and in.' I realized that I wasn't really getting to keep any of the really little memories like that, and that it may be an angry songs in some forms, but it's also a really sad song about the small things in your life that you lose track of. And it's called "Have You Seen Me Lately?"

Ghost train

When you fall in love with someone...Your life is like a train full of these ghosts, you know, they're just sort of strung out behind you. And when you fall in love with someone, it's as if you both get on the train together with all your respective ghosts. And the longer you're in it, the more you show each other all of these ghosts. And it's, it's a very hard thing for a lot of people to do, especially myself. And in the song, the character doesn't do it, you know, he gets off the train. And as it says in the last verse, 'I took the cannonball down to the ocean and watched the diesel disappear beneath the tumbling waves, love is a ghost train howling on the radio, remember me, she said, when only memory remains' meant for him, that is all that remains of this thing and he remembers it in every chorus when he...The chorus is him remembering the moment when he met her when she said how do you do. And even though he got off the train, the chorus is the way in which he remembers why at one point he thought he might ride it. And, here's Dan.

Copyright Martin Sebastian Millara

Last update January 2000 …