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“Round Here” – Counting Crows
(Words/music: David Bryson, Adam Duritz , Dave Janusko, Dan Jewett, and Chris Roldan, available on August and Everything After, Geffen 1993)

It would be unfair to boil the Counting Crows down to Adam Duritz and backing musicians, but it wouldn’t be too far off.  At their best, the Counting Crows craft music that follows emotional twists and turns Duritz creates with his lyrics.  It’s a credit to their musicianship that these guys fill any necessary role, whether it’s upbeat and jangly or downtrodden and reserved.  This emotional range makes August and Everything After a compelling listen – while Duritz hides behind the music occasionally, he generally bears all and lets the music reflect his mind.  While some of the later Counting Crows albums border on trite, Duritz is honest, subtle, and engaging on this album and provides a backbone for an album’s worth of wonderful songs.  While Duritz is the key figure, his band brings these songs the extra mile – he sets them up, they knock them down skillfully.

“Round Here” provides the perfect opening for this album.  It begins in a quiet, reserved way, almost tentative to introduce itself to the listener.  Lyrically, Duritz evokes images of fog, ghosts, and general anonymity.  He wants to blend in to the surroundings, but soon enough his narrator steps out from the camouflage and begins telling his story.  At his emotions bubble, the music flows behind him – rising when he’s getting back into it, falling again to start over.  When the band plays at their most aggressive (during the funk-tinged bridge), the narrator seems the most in control of the narrative.  At this point, he’s shifted from sharing his thoughts and painting details to giving advice.  Everything’s fallen into place at this moment – both band and storyteller sound at their most confident, but just like the lightning he sings about, it’s gone soon enough, leaving Duritz questioning his confidence again.  This ebb and flow serves his story better than a verse / chorus structure could.  Rather than fit his tale into a set formula, Duritz leads his listener through his mind and some of the idiosycracise and insecurities that appear throughout the album.  Every step of the way, his band is there in part as reinforcement and in part as a guide to the listener that helps to steer the ship behind Duritz.  It’s an apt introduction to both the album and Duritz’s individual stories.

More on Counting Crows: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm