Counting Crows - Recovering the Satellites

On paper, I should hate this band. It’s a Bay Area alternative rock band that got snapped up in the post-Nirvana boom. The lead singer is a white guy with dreads and the last name “Duritz”. Their biggest song in the 2000s came out on the Shrek 2 soundtrack. I was prepared for the worst with this one (that being sixty minutes of Mr. Jones). Instead, I got something that, while quite commercial, was an excellent example of how genuine art can slip under the nose of commerce and onto American radio. The songs never dipped below “good”, and many songs were genuinely great, but most of the ways they’re great is they take things that other bands did before them and throw Adam Duritz’s amazing voice and David Geffen’s wallet at them to make them better.

I’m just going to rattle off some of those great ones. The opener “Catapult” parlays some moog and mellotron against each other into a huge midtempo alt-rock romp. “I’m Not Sleeping” does the Smashing Pumpkins 90s rock and strings thing with aplomb. “Angels of the Silences” is a goddamn Superchunk song with a rock’n’soul vocalist and a five thousand dollar per song mix budget. “Another Horsedreamer’s Blues” is a little Moody Blues, a little R.E.M. Most of these songs are a little R.E.M. These guys want to be R.E.M. so bad (or, perhaps, Geffen wanted someone in that niche to go head to head with Warner Brothers). There’s even some proto-Train in here.

The big hit is the second to last track, “A Long December”, and again, it’s something I should hate. It’s a five-minute piano ballad where the primary chorus is “na na na na yeah”. It’s about Los Angeles, a place I do not think should exist and have no intention to go to. And yet, “A Long December” moves me. It makes me think about the way that life hasn’t really turned out how I wanted, definitely not how I expected - sappy bullshit that 90s rock crooners want you to think about. It’s about the passage of time, but it’s also broad enough to be about anything, like a good pop rock song should be. Critically, it is also specific. It's about a visit that the band made to a friend who had nearly died in a motorcycle accident. It's grounded in real emotions and real experiences that the songwriters turned into something more universal. They lived it, so they believe in it. That authenticity, that self-belief is what prevents this album from bursting apart. Damn good stuff.

Recovering the Satellites by Counting Crows is a good album, and I like it.