Matchbox Twenty - North

Matchbox Twenty - North

Atlantic Records, 2012

Four stars

Well it's certainly been a year awash in '90s nostalgia. Before 2012 is out, we will have heard new work from Counting Crows, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Wallflowers, Green Day, Dave Matthew's Band, Eve 6, Our Lady Peace, No Doubt, Ben Folds Five, and probably a dozen more acts that I can't name off the top of my head. Most of those artists have been gone for at least three years, several have been flitting in and out of operation for the better part of the last ten years, and a few of them are releasing their first full-length albums in a decade.

The last time Rob Thomas made a genuine album with his band, it was 2002. The album was called More Than You Think You Are and it released the day after I turned twelve. Back then, I hadn’t become the music enthusiast I am now, but I still loved Matchbox Twenty: I always had, ever since the days when my brother used to play Yourself or Someone Like You on car rides to school in the morning. Their brand of easily digestible, melodic alternative-rock appealed to me greatly, and the fact that they had three albums where I liked ALL of the songs (a common occurrence for me now, but not so much back then) made them, fairly easily, my first "favorite band." If the charts were anything to go by, a lot of people agreed with me. Over the next year or two, More Than You Think You Are would spawn a handful of singles that became nearly ubiquitous. You couldn't turn on the radio without hearing the elegiac banjo acoustics of "Unwell," the Mick Jagger-assisted blues-rock of "Disease," or the piano-laced bombast of "Bright Lights," and I was glad for it. In a sea of pop, rap, and R&B that I didn't care for at all, Rob Thomas and the boys were an old standby that I was happy to see achieve continued success.

As I got more and more into music throughout 2003 and 2004, Matchbox's records remained in fairly constant rotation, and I remember anxiously hoping for the day that the band would announce their plans to put out another LP.

I didn't know that I was about to wait for a long, long time.

Rob Thomas went solo in 2005, delivering the lukewarm ...Something to Be, but promising that Matchbox Twenty would be reconvening once they all got their "go-it-alone" urges out of their systems. That reunion finally happened in 2007 - almost exactly five years after More Than You Think You Are dropped - but even then, it wasn't the day that I had anticipated back in my musically formative days. Rather than releasing a full-length follow-up to their 2002 smash, they announced that they were readying a greatest hits collection (to be called Exile on Mainstream, in another hint to Jagger) that would feature an EP's worth of new material. The greatest hits tracklist was safe, marking off all the requisite radio staples and ignoring the deeper cuts; the new songs, meanwhile, ranged from solid to great, but only made me want more. I wondered if these guys would ever make another album together, and if they did, whether or not it would just sound like a Rob Thomas solo effort.

Luckily, North is the best record Rob Thomas has made since 2002, and offers rock-solid evidence that the frontman is always better with his trusty band of brothers at his back. Opener "Parade" is an achingly gorgeous ode to the times of our life that fly by far too quickly, and it instantly recalls the best moments of the MB20 discography. "When the slow parade went past/And it felt so good you knew it couldn't last/And all too soon the end was gonna come without a warning/And you'd have to just go home," Thomas croons, seemingly bottling up a decade's worth of bygone memories and missed opportunities into one knock-out beauty of a song. The same can be said for "Overjoyed," a signature Rob Thomas love ballad that could have fit easily on the band's last album. Both tunes are safe, playing to the same formula that the band has utilized throughout their entire career: emotional, heart-on-your-sleeve pop-rock that's easy to like and hard to hate. Surrounding the lead-off single (the insanely catchy "She's so Mean") at the album's kick-off, "Parade" and "Overjoyed" struck me as exactly what I wanted "North" to be, and exactly what I thought it would fall short of being: nostalgic while also sounding fresh, reminiscent of past glories while also forging new ones. And most of all, NOT like a Thomas solo album. I thought that, if the album stuck in that same safe but oh-so-appealing vein throughout, it would be on the fast-track towards my end-of-the-year top ten.

Sadly, "North" has a couple missteps. The jarring "Put Your Hands Up" is about as bad as you would expect a song with that title to be, and breaks the reverie of the opening trio with an incredibly misguided attempt at a dance anthem. The lyrics are Rob Thomas's most cringe-worthy to date, a mélange of outdated pop music clichés that would fail even with the most tongue-in-cheek delivery, and with an earworm hook so gratingly catchy that listeners might do better just to delete the song and replace it with a bonus track. Luckily, the other two tracks in the “dance” vein, the groovy synth-based "How Long" and the dark-flavored pop of "Like Sugar," work out much better, successfully blending that old '90s radio rock sound with today's more electronic influence. The former, especially, is infectious.

Still, the best songs here are the ones that land closest to the way the band used to do things. "Our Song" and the brassy "Radio" both have the kind of driving beat and rock sensibility that Thomas's solo records mostly lacked, while the ringing guitar lines and expansive atmospherics of "The Way" (which sees guitarist Kyle Cook taking lead vocals) make the song an undeniable highlight. “English Town” is the set’s most adventurous moment, an orchestral, multi-layered mid-tempo rocker that builds from a haunting piano intro (straight out of Sia's "Breathe Me") into a haunting but all-too-brief explosion of horns. And "Sleeping at the Wheel" closes the album in the same vein that "Parade" opened it - with a gorgeous ballad that is very much in the band's wheelhouse, but which hits hard nonetheless.

It's never easy for a band to come back after an extended absence, be it four years, eight years, or a decade. With North, there's some obvious rust that Thomas and co had to shake off, and the result, while very enjoyable, doesn't quite live up to the stuff they were putting out in their heyday. That said, there are a lot of great songs here, and in a year that has been lacking in great pop and pop rock albums, this record is a very welcome addition. At their best, the songs from North can still stand up against anything Rob Thomas has ever written: "Parade" is as solid as "3AM" ever was, "Radio" could go shot for shot with "Long Day" any day of the week, and if "Overjoyed" doesn't replicate the smash hit success of "Unwell," then you can only blame the shifting music scene. There are a few duds here, but what Matchbox Twenty come up with the rest of the time is a lovable bunch of songs that will almost certainly land somewhere on my end-of-the-year list, a collection that is better and more consistent than either of the ones Thomas put together on his own, and one that announces the return of one of the best bands in radio rock: I only hope that, this time, they don't spend a decade on the bench.

On the Horizon: My Most Anticipated Albums for the Rest of 2012

2012 has been a pretty solid year thus far, as far as music releases have been concerned. The overall output of great records to grace my ears this year has actually surprised me quite a bit, considering the fact that a large percentage of my favorite artists put out material in 2011, and I thought for awhile that last year's embarrassment of riches my lead to a dearth of greatness for this year. But I should have known better: I've been discovering progressively more music than ever before during each of the years since 2008 or so, and this year has been no exception: making my end-of-the-year list is already going to be a battle. As close as I can figure, about 3 or 4 of the slots in my top ten are already spoken for, with Springsteen almost guaranteed to be sitting in the top spot. That leaves plenty of room for great new discoveries, not to mention late-year arrivals of favorite artists. And of course, there's the summer season, which generally brings out the albums that capture my consciousness the most.

Anticipation is a difficult thing: expectations can color your opinion of an album to a degree that it would never hit you as hard as it could have otherwise, but they also lend a valuable aura to the releases they surround. Very often, an artist can never top the "first" album you heard from them: I know this has proven true for a number of my favorite acts, Butch Walker, Jimmy Eat World, and Jack's Mannequin, to name a few, and year after year, I start my listens to albums from artists of that level with disappointment, and move toward elation as time goes on. I always need a few listens to shed my pre-ordained expectations of what the album should be so I can start to appreciate what it actually is. And although there are some albums that do, ultimately, end up on the "letdowns list" at the end of each year, more often, the albums that I looked forward to the most end up somewhere near the top to the list. Which brings me to the topic of this post: my top five most anticipated full-length releases on the horizon for the remainder of the year. For this group, I tried to steer towards albums that had titles, tracklists, and release dates already announced, and left the more "speculative" picks for the section at the bottom, but in a few cases, my adoration for a specific artist, plus a few hopeful indications, overpowered that impulse.

1. The Gaslight Anthem - Handwritten (out July 24th)

It's only taken about four years for Brian Fallon to evolve from a respected indie-punk frontman to a potential savior of the rock 'n' roll art. That transformation began on 2008's massive The '59 Sound, where Springsteen references, big choruses, and Fallon's desperation-laced vocals built a nighttime drive record for the ages. 2010s American Slang and last year's side project, The Horrible Crowes, were only slightly less stellar, but if "45," the first single from Handwritten, is any indication, Fallon and company might be poised to drop their masterpiece. The song sounds like vintage-Fallon, channeling equal parts Springsteen and punk-rock, and delivering an opus of crisp electric guitar tones, elegantly nostalgic poetry, and soaring vocals that suggest that, yes, Brian Fallon really might be the guy to save rock 'n' roll. I've been dying to see these guys live since the first time I heard "The Backseat," the colossal and emotional closer from The '59 Sound, and I'm hoping this record will finally bring them close to me (or, at very least, SOMEWHERE IN THE UNITED FUCKING STATES), but if nothing else, I have a very strong feeling that Handwritten could end up playing the part of my fabled "summer soundtrack" record this year, and if that's the case, then it could even have a shot at my album of the year title (against, who else? Springsteen).

2. The Wallflowers - TBA (out Fall 2012)

It's been 7 years now since The Wallflowers moniker got its last full-length release. They've toured since (I saw them for the first time in 2009), and frontman Jakob Dylan was been busy (he's released a pair of folky, acoustic-based records), but for a long time, it seemed like the '90s alt-rock band was just going to fade off into dust. That last record, entitled Rebel, Sweetheart saw The Wallflowers at the top of their game, with Dylan embracing the poetic style of his father's writing, but doing so in a context and sound that never sacrificed the band's roots. Their breakthrough album, 1996's Bringing Down the Horse will always be my favorite work of theirs, but Rebel was a terrific and lyrically brilliant set of songs that, in the many times I have listened to it since then, has both made me yearn for new material and ruminate on how, if the band were to never reunite, it would be more than an appropriate swansong. But that's all for naught now, since the band has been in the studio all year, and plans to release a new record this fall. And while I enjoyed Dylan's solo material, he never sounds better than when he's got ringing electric guitars and Rami Jaffee's soulful B3 organ swelling behind him.

3. The Killers - Battle Born (tentative title, out Fall or Winter 2012)

It's been a long time since Day & Age topped my list of biggest letdowns for the year back in 2008, and a lot of things have changed since then, including my opinion of that album. While it's certainly their worst (and that ranking includes frontman Brandon Flowers' stellar 2010 solo debut, Flamingo), Day & Age still contains a lot of great work, and I rather unfairly wrote it off back in the day. Still, I'm hoping for a return to form on the follow-up, though I must confess, I don't really know what that form would be. The band traversed a lot of musical ground, from the new-wave synths and dance-floor beats of Hot Fuss, to the Bruce Springsteen worship of Sam's Town, all the way to the eclectic and bizarre collision of those things that took place on record number three. There's not a lot that's known about their fourth, but I think we can be pretty sure of one thing: Flowers' and co. love to surprise their fans, and even if there's a return to form here, anyone looking for Hot Fuss 2 or Sam's Town 2 is setting themselves up for disappointment.


4. John Mayer - Born and Raised (out May 22nd)

Ever since I bought a copy of Heavier Things back in 2003 (which, I'm fairly certain, was the first album I ever purchased for myself), Mayer and his music have been completely entwined in my musical evolution. Since then, he's dropped an album every three years, like clockwork, but his albums have always been September, October, or November releases, and never spring/summer ones. Mayer's records have always been the kind that I'm more likely to get lost in on a long autumn day than to blare, full volume, on a summer's night, but Born and Raised, with it's promised alt-country and folk tendencies, may make a compelling argument for the contrary. Mayer has never been content to make the same album twice, and I have very little idea of what to expect from this album, whether it will be full of sunny, folky jams, or steel-guitar laden slow-burns perfect for late-night drives, but either way, I can't wait.

5. Green Day - ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, ¡Tré! (out September 25,  November 13, and January 15, 2013, respectively)

I think it's audacious for bands to attempt double albums, but the concept of a triple-album goes right past that into insane territory. Because of that fact, and because all of Green Day's contemporaries that have attempted the double album (The Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters) have done so with distinctly mixed results, I have my reservations about this project. Green Day's last album, 2009's 21st Century Breakdown was decent but disappointing after the masterful American Idiot, and we don't know anything about this project, whether the albums will span the musical influences of the band's three members or just contain a bunch of songs from the same writing and recording sessions. Either way, the three album sequence, which will span a four month period and produce a pair of records eligible for 2012's end-of-the-year lists, is most certainly an indulgence in pop-music excess, and I'm excited to see what comes of it. It's doubtful that the band has a masterpiece on their hands here, but my highest expectations envision a ridiculously eclectic set of songs from a band that most people have always written off as distinctly one-note. Only time will tell.

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The two without release dates and titles present a difficulty for a list like this, since it's easy for a band to promise a release one day, and change their mind a few months later. That said, the word from The Wallflowers just broke today, and I have faith in them, since they've been posting pretty regular studio updates on their Facebook all year, and since Jakob Dylan isn't a guy who tends to disappear for long periods of time. I'm a whole lot less sure about The Killers, since we haven't seen any decent updates since January (or so). But Flowers has released an album every two years like clockwork since Hot Fuss broke back in 2004, and you'd think that Island would be keen on getting one of their biggest properties back into action: my guess is that we'll see that record in November or December, right in time for the Holiday Season and the sales boost it provides.

Beyond those albums, the year is still a pretty open slate, but there are some pretty exciting things on the horizon, both confirmed and scheduled (Motion City Soundtrack's Go, The Tallest Man On Earth's There's No Leaving Now, Glen Hansard's Rhythm and Repose, Sun Kil Moon's Among the Leaves, among many others) to the much more speculative list (New stuff from U2, Matchbox Twenty...I'll believe that one when I see it, and Mumford & Sons). U2 has been all over the place in terms of release rumors recently, from saying they had three different albums in the works a year or two ago, to Bono hinting that the band might be ready to call it a day. In the wake of the biggest rock 'n' roll tour in music history, it's safe to say the band has earned some time off. But since they've been toying with releasing Songs of Ascent, an album of material from around the No Line On The Horizon era, since 2010, and since they teased fans with the interesting prospects of a Danger Mouse-produced reinvention, it would be a shame for them to close the doors before at least seeing where those roads might lead. As for Matchbox Twenty, it's been ten longs years since the '90s alt-rock darlings dropped their last full-length (More Than You Think You Are, which was also their best work), a hiatus that saw both a Greatest Hits collection and a pair of decent solo offerings from frontman Rob Thomas. If the band finally makes their return this year, it will be the long overdue arrival of an album I've been waiting for since I was 11 or 12 years old, and while I'm certainly not in the same place I was back then, musically or in any other way, I'd certainly welcome a new record from those guys any day of the week.

As of now, I don't think this year will be quite the illustrious display for music that 2011 was, but if all of the albums listed above live up to expectations, and if a few albums come out of nowhere and knock my socks off (which has been happening more and more recently), then who knows?

"And all at once you look across a crowded room to see the way that light attaches to a girl..."

 A Tribute to the Music of Counting Crows

When I think about the bands that have defined my musical experience the most, there aren't many that I can list higher than Counting Crows. Back in the mid-90s, my music listening was limited to whatever CDs my parents would play in the car or whatever albums my brother would bring home one day to play on his boombox. I remember afternoons and evenings sitting around in the basement, listening to his CD collection, picking out the ones I liked most, and having him make me cassette tape copies of those. There are albums and artists I fell in love with back then that I still listen to regularly: The Wallflowers' Bringing Down the Horse remains one of my favorite albums; I'm still waiting for the new Matchbox Twenty album, still wondering what would have happened if Oasis ever made another record as good as Morning Glory, and most certainly still enthralled by the flawless trinity of songs that ends Third Eye Blind's self-titled album. Hell, I might even still have some of those tapes. I believe Green Day's Dookie and Weird Al's Bad Hair Day were also among the collection. I was super cool.

One of my earliest musical memories was hearing Counting Crows for the first time. We were climbing into the car after some bike trip, and my brother slipped my step dad's copy of August and Everything After into the CD player. "Mr. Jones" issued from the speakers, and I loved it immediately. It's a moment I would think of a lot a little less than a decade later, when I bought the band's greatest hits collection (called Films About Ghosts, after one of my all-time favorite lyrics from "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby"). At that point in time, I think I owned about six CDs, half of which were Creed (I am not proud of this), but that CD, which contained 16 of the Crows' songs, was a turning point. Throughout that winter, I played that record almost every day, and those songs brought life into the bleak winter weather that covers my hometown every year: the rip roaring electricity of "Angels of the Silences," the emotional swell of "Round Here," the lyrical perfection of "A Long December" and "Mrs. Potter," and the nostalgic beauty of "Recovering the Satellites," they all became a part of me.

Naturally, my impulsive purchase of the greatest hits record only made me want to delve deeper into the band's back catalog, a key event in my musical evolution. Up to that point I'd always pretty much been a "singles" guy. I had a couple of albums (again, not proud), but most of my listening revolved around the mix CDs that I made out of songs I heard on the radio or on TV shows (most of these are still at least partially listenable, thankfully). That was about to change. I dug up my parents' copy of August and my brother's copy of Recovering the Satellites and I dove in. I still maintain the former is one of the greatest records of all time, and I was shocked that most of the album's best songs ("Round Here" and "Anna Begins" being the exceptions) were left off of Films. Over the years, every song on that album has come to mean something to me. The lyrics of "Time and Time Again" took my breath away, while the climactic scope of "A Murder of One" (and an impeccable vocal performance from frontman Adam Duritz), made it one of my favorite songs. "Sullivan Street" became one of my go-to nighttime drive songs when I finally got my first car, and the palpable emotion I could hear in Duritz' voice on key album cuts like "Anna Begins," "Raining in Baltimore" and "Round Here" keep him on the list of my all-time favorite singers. For all of those reasons and many more, August remains my favorite album of the 90s. The loneliness and desperation of those songs have kept me coming back, year after year, even as other records that I loved as a kid have begun to fall hollow; that record was one of the first times I realized just how much visceral, emotional power music could have, and that discovery is one that continues to drive my love of music, even to this day.

 

Recovering the Satellites was (and is) a much more challenging record. On "Mr. Jones," Duritz sang, "when I look at the television, I wanna see me staring right back at me." It was a big pop song from a guy who wanted to be big and popular, and the irony was, it was just the song that granted him those wishes. Satellites finds him looking around at what his life has become since he wrote that song and rebelling against that fame. Right from the first two tracks, the scorching back to back duo of "Catapult" and "Angels of the Silences," it's clear that this isn't the same band that laid down the folky jams on August. The first half of the record finds them turning up the electricity and delivering a set of songs full of anger, confusion and nostalgic yearning for simpler times. It's a master class in intensity, from the blistering build of "I'm Not Sleeping" to the memorable riff on "Have You Seen Me Lately," though it's broken up a bit by the dusky nostalgic of "Daylight Fading" and the gorgeous alt-country lilt of "Goodnight Elisabeth." It's when the rage begins to dissipate and the amplifiers go down that the record becomes an enigma, and I've always had a much harder time getting a handle on the second half for that reason. The songs range from stark piano ballads ("Miller's Angels," the most depressing song Duritz ever wrote) to almost blues-rock experimentation ("Another Horsedreamer's Blues," "Mercury") to what might be the strangest album cut I've ever heard from an established band ("Monkey"), but amidst this oddly appealing collection of deep cuts are three of the best songs in the discography: the title track, "A Long December" and "Walkaways," which I've often thought of as my favorite Counting Crows song. It's less than a minute and a half long, just 16 bars of Duritz and an acoustic guitar, bidding a bittersweet farewell to...well, I'm not so sure. "Someday, I'm gonna stay," he sings in the album's dying moments. "But not today."

Satellites has never been my favorite Counting Crows album, but every time I listen to, it draws me in and beguiles me. I've always thought of it as an inconsistent record, not in the strength of its material but in its mood and sound, and the result is a disjointed, confusing collection of songs, but it's also a truly captivating one. It's a portrait of a troubled mind and of a man who got everything he wished for and realized it was both a blessing and a curse. Duritz has often stated his belief that Recovering the Satellites is the band's finest work, and while I don't necessarily agree with him, I can see where he is coming from.

 

The following summer, I bought Hard Candy, which was, at the time, the band's most recent record. Awhile ago, I wrote a blog post about the importance of the "summer soundtrack" album in my life, that album that comes along and defines the long, glorious months of that season. Hard Candy was my first summer soundtrack album, and even as I've grown up and summers have come and gone, I can still come back to it on a beautiful, warm summer night and feel the same way I always have. On "Up All Night," Duritz sings, "we could drive out to the dunes tonight, 'cause summer's almost here," and on "Miami," it's "the bus is running, it's time to leave, this summer's gone and so are we." Those songs are the cornerstones of this record, and they've pretty much bookended each of my summers since the day this record came into my life. The former takes me back to those nights just before summer breaks, when you can almost taste the coming season, and when I hear the latter, I hear the endings of half a dozen perfect summers and my heart still aches for them. When I listen to records for the first time today, the first thing that strikes me is the emotional aspect in the singer's voice, and that's all thanks to listening to Adam Duritz for so many years. I still remember the first time I listened to "Miami." The way that song builds into this climactic vocal tour-de-force still blows me away, but back then, I don't think I'd ever heard anything like it. And yet even despite how terrific that song (and many others) are, Hard Candy has always been written off by fans, considered by some to be the weakest link in their discography. There aren't many more misunderstood records in my collection. The naysayers saw Candy as the record where the long tortured Adam Duritz sold out, cheered up, and wrote bunch of bubblegum pop songs; nothing could be further from the truth. The hooks are the brightest the band has ever written, drenched in sunny pop production and instrumentation, but underneath that are some of the most strikingly dark songs Duritz has ever written, whether he's imagining a suicide ("Black & Blue"), struggling with his longstanding battles with insomnia and depression ("Goodnight L.A.," "Holiday in Spain"), dealing with a miscarriage ("Carriage"), or going through a particularly damaging break-up ("Miami"). The combination of the album's bright pop hooks with its dark subject matter has always been incredibly compelling to me, and it's something that's kept me coming back to this album over and over again. It reminds me, in that regard, of Butch Walker's Letters, and much like that album, it's an absolute love letter to all kinds of pop music, from rootsy classic rock ("If I Could Give All My Love"), to spiraling synth-pop ("New Frontier") to songs that sound like they would have been right at home in a classic stage musical ("Butterfly in Reverse," "Why Should You Come When I Call?"). There's not a bad song on the set, and for a long time, Hard Candy was my all time favorite album.

This Desert Life and Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings are the lesser pieces of the catalog, in my eyes, though the former is another fantastic, interesting direction for the band to take, and the latter contains some truly stellar songs. Desert Life was the last of the initial four that I got in to, and the one I liked the least of those, but there are a lot of moments on that record that still bring back great memories. The outstanding lyricism in "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby" put the song among Adam's greatest accomplishments, while "Speedway" is one of his most effective break-up songs and "Colorblind" is one of the most hypnotic songs ever, by anyone. And then there's the vaguely experimental atmosphere running through the likes of "High Life" and "I Wish I Was a Girl" (another very, very strange song), the gorgeously downbeat "Amy Hit the Atmosphere," and the gloriously climactic "get into my car and drive!" moment at the end of "St. Robinson in his Cadillac Dream," the album's finale. Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is, I think, the only less than stellar record in the discography, though when it came out, I didn't think so. I bought it on release day, in March of 2008, nearly six years removed from Hard Candy's arrival, and I played the hell out of it. The Saturday Nights portion has always been great, revitalizing the sound the band used on Satellites, and culminating in "Cowboys," the kind of furiously angry anthem you play at full volume in the car when you're pissed off (I can't do this anymore, since I drive far too fast when I do). The Sunday Mornings portion is blessed with some truly gorgeous folk songs ("Washington Square," "On Almost Any Sunday Morning," "When I Dream of Michelangelo"), but I've always thought it gets more and more bogged down by its concept as it goes. That doesn't stop the Crows from delivering a typically strong closer (the fantastic "Come Around"), but there's a preponderance of filler ("Tuesday in Amsterdam" is the dullest song Adam Duritz has ever written), and the record ends up feeling both overlong and not quite effective in its themes. That said, and despite the fact that its fallen out of regular rotation since 2008, I'm not sure if there was a record I played more that year. It dropped three days before my spring break, after an endless wait for new music from the band and what had felt like the longest winter of my life, and it pretty much became the soundtrack for that break (an impromptu road trip to New York City) and the rest of the spring that followed.

And now there's a covers album on the way. It's called Underwater Sunshine, out March 27th, and featuring a long slate of songs that the Crows have been playing and making their own for years now. Many of them have made fairly regular appearances in live shows (and have likely made their way onto the iPods of Crows fans, thanks to the band's open door policy for bootleggers), and a few have even been recorded in the studio before (hell, I downloaded their version of "Start Again" on the same day that I first heard "Up All Night). My point is, I've always known many of these songs more for the band's covers of them than for their original versions, and as a result, I'm thinking this will almost feel like a brand new, full-length record from them, to me. Anyway, here's the song list:

"Jumping Jesus" by Sordid Humor
"Start Again" by Teenage Fanclub
"All My Failures" by Dawes
"Meet On The Ledge" by Fairport Convention
"Like Teenage Gravity" by Kasey Anderson & The Honkies
"Ballad of El Goodo" by Big Star
"Coming Around" by Travis
"Four White Stallions" by Tender Mercies
"You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" by Bob Dylan (originally recorded by The Byrds)
"Untitled (Love Song)" by The Romany Rye
"Ooh La La" by The Faces
"Hospital" By Coby Brown
"Return of the Grievous Angel" by Gram Parsons
"Mercy" by Tender Mercies
"Amie" by Pure Prairie League

I, for one, am excited about this record. One of the great things about the Counting Crows is their obvious love of music, a love that permeates every moment of every record they've made and probably every live show they've ever played. I still haven't seen them live, but their aren't many acts with better bootleg collections, and listening to live versions of their songs is riveting because of their tendency to reinvent things on the spot. It's still amazing to me that, even after months spent not listening to this band, a live version of "Round Here" can still pop up on shuffle and blow my mind. The way Adam invests himself emotionally in his live performances, that song in particular, is a stunning thing to hear, and it places this band near the top of the "artists I need to see live" list. My hope is that we'll get a tour for this covers record, or that maybe it will even inspire Adam to start work on another full length record. But even if Duritz is at the point of his life where he wants to do the band on a more part-time basis than he once did, and even if he never writes another record (this does seem possible, judging by the ever increasing gaps between albums), at least I still have the records: I'll always have August for those rainy days, Satellites for those gloomy, wintery afternoons, Hard Candy for warm summer nights and This Desert Life for every first day of Spring. And, above all, I'll always have the memories of how those records came along when I was 13 years old and changed my life.