Counting Crows - Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow

Counting Crows - Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow
Cooking Vinyl, 2013
7.5/10

Let me preface this review by saying that it’s incredibly hard for me to say anything negative about Counting Crows. Without the lyrical grace and emotional inflection of frontman Adam Duritz, I probably wouldn’t be writing these words. One of my earliest musical memories was hearing this band for the first time. My family and I were climbing into the car after some bike trip, and my brother decided it was an opportune moment to slip my step-dad's copy of August and Everything After into the CD player. He skipped forward a few numbers, “Mr. Jones” issued from the speakers, and I fell in love immediately. That memory was one I considered a lot a decade later when I picked up the band’s greatest hits collection (called Films About Ghosts) and began to discover Counting Crows beyond just the singles. 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 record, which contained 16 of the Crows' “best” songs, was a turning point. Throughout that winter, I played the album almost every afternoon, and those songs breathed vitality and life into the bleak winter landscape that had taken up residence in my hometown: the rip-roaring electricity of “Angels of the Silences,” the emotional swell of “Round Here,” the poetic perfection of “A Long December” and “Mrs. Potter Lullaby,” and the nostalgic beauty of “Recovering the Satellites,” they all became a part of me.

In the nine-plus years since, Counting Crows have only released a single album of original content. Needless to say, I became a die-hard fan of the band at precisely the wrong moment. Following four terrific albums, spaced out on an every-three-year timeframe from 1993 to 2002, Films About Ghosts was the band’s way of telling the world they were taking a breather. Half a decade would pass before their fifth full-length—2008’s lukewarm Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings—hit the streets, and then Duritz and company would take another four years to come up with last year’s Underwater Sunshine, a well-executed cover album, but a cover album nonetheless. In the meantime, the band has done their best to mollify their fans’ growing restlessness with a series of live albums—a document of the Hard Candy tour in 2006 and a special full-album performance of August & Everything After in 2011—and their latest release, called Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow, is the next in that series.

To be fair, Counting Crows are a transcendent live act, and each of their live records bears its own significance and personality. Where their first concert album—1998’s Across a Wire—was a double-disc affair showcasing the band in both stripped-down acoustic and full-blown electric environments, Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow finds them as a seasoned collective of professionals, comfortable with traversing their entire catalog, transfiguring old favorites, resurrecting deep cuts, and delivering covers like they’re originals. In fact, the finest moment of the disc is the Bob Dylan song that kicks it off. “Girl From North Country,” culled from Dylan’s 1963 breakthrough, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, is one of the legendary singer/songwriter’s most yearning compositions, and this cover is as good as they come. Performed at the start of the show, with just vocals and acoustic guitar, “Girl from North Country” is a stark and intimate reminder of Duritz’s ability to generate pin-drop intensity in a room. Where many bands from the 1990s radio-rock scene now rely heavily on old hits and crowd sing-alongs to carry their shows, the Crows’ greatest asset as a live band has always been their gift for maintaining rapt audience attention in less-familiar territory.

“Round Here” is a perfect example of the above phenomenon. Originally the song that broke the silence at the top of their debut, “Round Here” rarely maintains the same arrangement and format from tour to tour. (Legend has it that the song has also never been exactly recreated in the manner it appears on record.) While the general road-map of the song remains the same—the chiming guitar intro, the poetic verses, the dynamic emotional build-up—Duritz and company frequently pepper it with alterations, improvisations, and interpolations of other artists’ songs. The “Round Here” that appears with this collection is one of the best, bursting breathtakingly into loose improv sections and sly snippets of Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing.” “Darling summer’s almost over, before the world gets too much colder/Come outside and run away with me,” Duritz wails spontaneously over the song’s elongated mid-section: for a moment, this feels like the Crows of old.

But beyond the first two tracks, the most notable thing about this particular live album is the setlist. For a band that has supported a bootleg-trading network within their fanbase for almost as long as they’ve had a fanbase, it doesn’t make much sense for Counting Crows to keep going back to the well for more “official” live releases, but if they’re going to do so, it’s at least nice that they try not to retread songs that have already appeared on previous concert discs (with a few exceptions). This particular release is loaded with deep cuts, from the harmonica-laced blues of “Mercury” (a forgotten gem from the experimental second side of 1996’s Recovering the Satellites) to a pair of songs from both This Desert Life (the road-trip folk of “Four Days” and the downright-bizarre “I Wish I Was a Girl) and Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings (the hazy emotional breakdown of “Sundays” and the haunting siren song that is “Le Ballet d’Or”). But it’s Hard Candy—which celebrated its tenth anniversary last year—that supplies the rest of the highlights.

Often dismissed as a misguided and overproduced expedition into the realms of mainstream pop music, Hard Candy is one of the most misunderstood and unfairly maligned albums in recent memory. On record, the studio gloss and soaring hooks masked a complex lyrical web, a collection of songs that revealed Adam Duritz’s increasingly serious battles with insomnia, depression, and mental instability. On the gorgeous “Carriage”—one of the forgotten late-album tracks which gets resurrected here in wonderful fashion—amidst a gentle acoustic lilt, the burn of a lone trumpet player, and lyrics about “chocolate bars and baseball cards,” a once-meaningful relationship all but vanishes into the tragedy of a losing an unborn child. “Up All Night,” meanwhile, is one of the five best songs Duritz has ever written, the kind of glorious, dusky anthem you play in the car at night when the weather is finally starting to warm up.“This is a summertime song,” Duritz announces at the song’s outset. “Hard Candy was a late night album.” If you need any extra encouragement to catch the Crows on their tour with the Wallflowers this summer, look no further than this penultimate scorcher.

Ultimately, Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow is a solid document of a great live band. The covers are good, the setlist is unique, and there are a few transcendent moments. But Counting Crows—Duritz especially—are too talented to become one of those bands that only plays live shows and releases cover albums. Maybe I’m biased, since I’d call August & Everything After the single greatest album of the nineties and since I love Hard Candy more than anyone else I’ve ever encountered, but I truly believe that Duritz has the skill, both as a songwriter and a frontman, to land in the pantheon of greats. Even if he never writes another song or never releases another album, he’s got a pretty killer legacy to leave behind. But I’d like to think that this band still has at least one classic left in them, and while frequent concert tours and live albums are nice to have, but I’m infinitely more excited for that next step forward.

Michael McDermott - Hit Me Back

Michael McDermott - Hit Me Back

Rock Ridge Music

Four stars

“Michael McDermott's music, like Springsteen's and Van Morrison's, helped me to find a part of myself that wasn't lost, as I had feared, but only misplaced. That's why we love the ones who are really good at it, I think: because they give us back ourselves, all dusted and shined up, and they do it with a smile....Michael McDermott is one of the best songwriters in the world and possibly the greatest undiscovered rock and roll talent of the last 20 years."

-Stephen King

In the 21 years since the release of Michael McDermott’s debut (1991’s 620 W. Surf), Stephen King has always remained one of the singer/songwriter’s biggest fans, quoting lyrics in his books or offering testimonials like the above excerpt for the liner notes of McDermott’s albums. But while King was always McDermott’s most noted champion, he was never his only one. Upon the release of 620 W. Surf, many critics named McDermott as the next in a long line of legendary songwriters, the heir apparent to Springsteen, Dylan, or Van Morrison. As is clear now, though, history told a much different tale. The hype went to McDermott’s head: he was only 22-years old, a young, naive, free spirit with no idea of how to reconcile his future path with his sudden dream-come-true situation. He responded to that predicament by going off the rails, turning to drugs and alcohol, partying in a fast-lane, out of control manner, and scaring the hell out of the people closest to him.

One of those people was A&R man Brian Koppelman, who went on to become a noted Hollywood screenwriter and producer, and Koppeman’s first film, the 1998 poker cult-classic Rounders, carried a lot of this experiences with McDermott within its narrative. Matt Damon’s gambling protagonist actually shared the songwriter’s stage name (they call him “Mike” in the movie), while Edward Norton’s character, an out-of-luck ex-con with big debts to pay, carried the surname Murphy, McDermott’s actual birthright. Though they gave their hero his name, Koppelman and screenwriting partner David Levien both admitted that McDermott aligned more with the Murphy character, a notorious screw-up who just can’t seem to catch a break. And things went like that for a long time, McDermott compromising his talent to drink his way to the bottom of a bottle after every show, or colliding with law enforcement with the 2002 cocaine bust that befell him on the way to see a Wallflowers show.

It wasn’t until midway through the decade that McDermott finally began to find his redemption. He found it in love (he was married in 2009 and now has a daughter) and in Italy, where he discovered that his music had reached a much greater audience than it ever did in the states. 2009’s fantastic Hey La Hey showed off a lot of that redemption, shedding the scars of McDermott’s scorched past and pledging resilience and devotion in its best songs. The follow-up isn’t quite as consistently solid, but it has more highlights and its best tracks are among the best things McDermott has written, period; a fair trade-off, I’d say.

Past its hooky opener and title track (where McDermott addresses his alcoholism through an instantly infectious chorus) Hit Me Back spends a few ponderous, sluggish tracks (“Let it Go,” “The Prettiest Girl in the World”) getting started, but once the record does settle upon the right path, it’s a wall of hits right to the end. The haunting “Dreams About Trains” kicks off an incredibly strong mid-section, carried along by ghostly back-up vocals and striking lyrical portraits that, in McDermott’s words, evoke “Robert Frost, Abraham Lincoln, Bobby Kennedy, The Blues Brothers, and the fact that [he’s] always lived near train tracks,” all in just over five minutes. The result is a masterfully dense piece of songwriting, with enough nuances and beautiful textures to spend hours dissecting; luckily, it’s only the tip of the iceberg.
The shattering “Ever After” finds McDermott ruminating on the loss of his mother, who passed away shortly before the recording of Hit Me Back. “The further we went on, I knew something was wrong, I felt it in my gut/I thought Pandora was joking when she said some doors that open won’t ever shut/Like a lion in a cage, my hands are fists of rage,” McDermott sings in the song’s second verse, his anger, grief, confusion, and regret boiling just below the surface. “Scars From Another Life” is no less viscerally powerful, a skyscraping, Springsteenian power ballad whose spacious, reverb-soaked production and floating piano arpeggios immediately position it as the album’s centerpiece cut. McDermott is challenging his demons here, carrying on the battle he was waging on Hey La Hey (and even referencing that album’s title in the song’s emotional refrain), and the result is an uplifting, redemptive, and life-affirming piece of music; there haven’t been more than a handful of better songs written this year.

“She’s Gonna Kill Me” is a pop-laced rocker in the same vein as the title track, while gorgeous piano ballad “Is There a Kiss Left on Your Lips” is its companion. Both songs deal with McDermott’s adjustment to married life, his tendency for staying out late, and the guilt he feels in sneaking back into the house long after everyone else has gone to sleep. The former is all-out fun, turning a situation many of us are familiar with into a rootsy sing-along surrounded by blazing guitars; the latter is even better, a buoyant arrangement built around the perfect poetry that McDermott wrote on his bathroom wall following one of those guilty homecomings. Elsewhere, “Deal with the Devil” is a sustained scorcher, a dark, haunting, and atmospheric slice of Americana that reprises many of Hit Me Back’s major themes (McDermott’s struggle with past crises, his coming-to-terms with his mother’s passing) over a barely repressed electric guitar. And album-highlight “The Silent Will Soon Be Singing” is a flawlessly structured acoustic number, almost Dylanesque in its execution, which recalls the more folky lilt of his last few records without sacrificing the deeply cohesive feel of this one.

The closing duo, composed of the string-soaked “Where the River Meets the Sea” and the appropriately blissful “Italy,” conclude the album in strong fashion. The former feels almost liturgical, graced with a traditional-feeling piano line, a beautiful female backing vocal, and McDermott’s most poignant and passionate delivery on the disc; it’s hardly surprising that the song served as McDermott’s eulogy for his late mother. The latter encompasses every ounce of redemption that McDermott found in Italy, a country that he says changed the course of his life. The harmonica intro evokes Nebraska-era Springsteen, but the lyrical and melodic structures are more reminiscent of Woodie Guthrie, a simplistic sensibility that turns the closer into a “This Land is Your Land” for a new age.

For many listeners, both of these songs (and indeed, this entire record) will drown in excessive sentiment and in classicist songwriting ideals that we’ve all heard before. But McDermott pours every ounce of himself into these songs, tearing down the walls between himself and his audience and cultivating a connection that is sometimes uncomfortable in its intimacy (songs like “Ever After” hit almost too close to home), but which is always striking in its power. These songs left an indelible mark upon me, their moods and feelings refusing to leave even as their final notes drifted away to nothingness, McDermott’s struggles and triumphs becoming my own.

Too few people will ever hear Hit Me Back, but Stephen King was right: McDermott is one of those songwriters whose music is meant to heal you, and there are only a few guys playing the game these days who just naturally have that power. Springsteen has it, for sure; Van Morrison certainly had it, though I haven’t yet heard his new album to confirm that he still does; modern favorites of mine, guys like Will Hoge, Chad Perrone, and Butch Walker (at his most confessional), definitely have it as well. Some will always be uncomfortable with songwriters like these: they will mock them for their earnestness and write them off for not reinventing the wheel, but those people aren’t really listening closely enough. For me, the best songwriters are the ones who, as King says, “give us back ourselves,” the ones who can form the sort of honest, intimate connection with their audience that McDermott forms so easily here, the ones with the ability to write songs that feel positively vital, that get under my skin and change me, even in the smallest way. McDermott may not have fame, but he has the rest of the act down in spades, and Hit Me Back, opening stumbles and all, is arguably his most profound statement to date.

John Mayer - The Complete 2012 Performances Collection

John Mayer - The Complete 2012 Performances Collection

Columbia Records, 2012

3.5 Stars 

Back in May, John Mayer delivered one of the best albums of the year (and one of his best to date) with Born & Raised. A couple months later, it remains an exquisite collection of infectious folk rock (“Queen of California”) and dusky alt-country (“Shadow Days,” the title track), and an indelible left turn for one of pop music’s most talented and consistent stars. True to form, Mayer landed the number one spot on the Billboard charts after a solid first week of sales, but the victory came with a bittersweet aftertaste: for the first time in his career, Mayer wasn’t able to ride out and meet his fans. Sidelined by a vocal condition called granuloma, the 34 year old guitar hero was forced to cancel the entirety of his summer tour, taking him away from the fans and the songs during what was arguably the creative peak of his career.

Mayer clearly felt the pain. Despite a vocal surgery looming (his second in less than a year), he couldn’t stay away from the music. Immediately following the release of Born & Raised, Mayer set a wildfire of rumors by commenting that he might just go ahead and begin work on the follow-up, and while the chances of him making good on those speculations and finishing an album by next summer seem doubtful now, he’s done the next best thing: released an EP before this summer even runs out. That EP, titled in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner as The Complete 2012 Performances Collection, features acoustic renditions of four of the tunes from Born & Raised, plus a previously unreleased b-side. And while this may not seem like anything to write home about in a day and age where bands release entire acoustic renderings of their albums, Mayer shows here that, even vocally impaired and left to his own devices in the studio, he’s still a force to be reckoned with.

Certainly, a full unplugged re-imagining of Born & Raised would have been even more welcome, but what we get here are four exquisitely re-imagined gems that, at worst, offer an interesting perspective on their more full-bodied counterparts, and at best, surpass them. Fitting into the former category is “Speak to Me,” already the original record’s weakest song, and one whose acoustic arrangement had little need for being stripped down further. Mayer speeds up the tempo here, his voice sounding loose, raspy, and rough. It’s an interesting take, but the re-arrangement misses the gorgeous backup vocals of the original, and ultimately comes across as a glorified demo. Slightly better is “Shadow Days,” which doesn’t thrive the same way it does on record (due mostly to the lack of steel guitar), but which is more than adequate nonetheless.

The treasures come with the other three tracks, however. Opener “Something Like Olivia” is a revelation in acoustic format, sporting an “Into the Mystic”-esque guitar part and a spontaneous, jazzy feel that allows Mayer to show off his chops. We often get to hear him wailing away on his electric, but up to this point, his acoustic moments have been relegated to balladry or to the adventurous “opening set” from 2008’s Where the Light Is: Live in Los Angeles. The songs here are very much in the vein of the latter, and just as that set gave deep cuts a chance to shine (the definitive recording of “Neon” can be found there), this one allows “Olivia” to reach new heights. “Queen of California” is another home run: the instrumentation translates fantastically, bringing out a countrified twang that the original, with its rousing guitar solo, didn’t really have. Mayer also cleverly rewrites the vocal melody, avoiding the higher notes and giving the song a dark edge that the sun-drenched album version lacked. As for the b-side, “Go Easy on Me” is a pleasant piece of traditional folk music, and while it’s not too hard to see why it didn’t make the record, it’s an undeniably gorgeous extra with some dependably nice guitar work and a Dylan-ish harmonica solo.



Mayer has come a long way in the past few years, working to shed his bad reputation and forced into a humbling situation with his vocal issue. Luckily for us, the music has only benefited from the change, and with this collection, it’s clear just how much the man’s fans mean to him. These five songs won’t make up for the canceled shows or satisfy all of the would-be ticket buyers, but it’s nice to know that Mayer is trying to make things right. The Complete 2012 Performances Collection is the sound of a guy who has no greater desire than to be out on the road, playing his songs, baring his soul, and making lots of other people happy. It’s little more than a supplement, but even with a handful of songs and half a voice, Mayer is still better than most of his contemporaries.