August and Everything Afer Back to the Top Most of the album was about people leaving, and the ability to stop leaving, too much ambivalence in the way you stick to other people, and the ability to stick to other people. I think Round Here is about someone who's left so much that he's turning into sort of a ghost, you know, just a memory of himself. You know, I really relate back to to the same character in Rain King, yeah, Rain King certainly, but more specifically in Ghost Train or Sullivan Street. The flip side at the end of the record is A Murder of One, which is about me looking at someone who is staying, but perhaps for all the wrong reasons. Because there was a friend of mine who was in a relationship that was really bad, and she stayed because it was safe, because she felt good there. But it was a suffocating degrading, numbing relationship and I was sort of telling her 'you should get out of that, you should change', you know. But it's funny, you know, there's an addition to that that I wrote which we only do live, I don't think we should do it all the time, where in the breakdown part the woman responds, 'How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people? How does it feel to be one of the fortunate ones? How does it feel to be all alone under the sun?' which is, kinda... I did it off the top of my head one day live in a concert, and it sorta responds to it, which is 'You're telling me to leave, to get out there cos it's safe, but you know, what's it like to be you, where everybody loves you, you're a big star, you know, And you're still alone. Maybe I don't want that danger.' And that's what she's sort of saying back." Round here Back to the Top This guy has heard all those life lessons that you're given when you're a child about what you should do to be a good adult and carve out your name in society -- all those cliches. He's an adult now and has the rights to do the things that 10-year-olds aren't allowed to do -- but so what, it's nothing. Everything has such consequences for him, he can't touch anything or anyone, he's terrified. By the end of the song, he's so completely lost; he's become more of a ghost than a person, and he's taking other people down with him. When you are a kid, people are always telling you to wait and they are always sending you to bed early. Round Here is a song about someone facing a life that doesn't seem to be the logical end product of all the things that he thought were leading up to it. For a list of these cliches of childhood, see every line of every chorus. In that last chorus he is saying I got all the things I wanted when I grew up(e.g. not having to wait for anything, staying up late) and it doesn't seem to mean anything("i can't see nothing round here"). (From Storytellers): 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 . But the more he begins to leave people behind in his life, the more he feels like he's leaving himself behind as well. 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. The chorus is, he sorta keeps screaming out these idioms these lessons that your mother might say to you when you were a kid, sorta child lessons ya know, ‘round here we always stand up straight'..'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, 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 sorta screaming out that he gets to stay up as late as he wants, and nobody makes him wait. The sorta things that are important if you're a kid, ya know.. that you don't have to go to bed, y ou don't have to do anything; but the sorta things that, they don't make any difference at all when you're an adult, they're nothing...and..this is a song about... about me. And it's called Round Here. Maria Back to the Top Maria is the only one who's not completely real. She's just an idea of someone I came up with when I was writing "Round Here." I mean, she's me. It's through the eyes of a girl, but it's someone very much like me struggling at the edge, not sure if she's going to fall off on one side or the other. It's a theme that's stuck through songs. So she keeps popping up. Omaha Back to the Top It's about how circular life is, how it turns people over the way the seasons turn over. Somehow life just bulldozes people. Mr. Jones Back to the Top - I love this song because there's so many levels to it. On one level, it's a simple guy song -- but it also has to do with all the things you dream about as a young musician, and how silly and sad and helpless it is to think that everyone's going to love you if you're famous. What do you think is going to be satisfying to get these dreams fulfilled? I can't tell you why I want some of the things I want, but I want...I want...I want... The song is about how strange it is to feel like the thing that makes your dream come true and the thing that makes you appear to the world is also what makes you feel like you're sort of disappearing to yourself. I think I felt very much like I was slipping away. It didn't feel like, `wow, I'm everywhere.' It just felt kind of crappy. "I think Mr. Jones, in a lot of ways, is about dreams, but there's a cautionary element to it. The guy keeps saying, `when everybody loves me, I'll never be lonely,' and you're supposed to realize that that is probably a mistake. It's a ridiculous statement." (From Storytellers) : 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 Musée d'Orsay 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. Perfect Blue Buildings Back to the Top The verses are about how horrifyingly gray and mundane and pointless life in general can be. Nothing catastrophic. Little horrors. Envy of other people. Deep need that is unsatisfied. Boredom. And so the chorus is about how seductive coma-visions are: these dreams of placidity, colors, shapes that are so clean. But the peace is a trap to the person in the song; he doesn't want to fall prey to the visions. Anna Begins Back to the Top It's about denial -- how far you'll go to deny that somethings really happening because it's too complicated, too terrifying, too difficult. It's about me and Anna: The relationship was supposed to be light -- we met on vacation -- but we got further into it and it became harder and harder. It's about all the things you go through trying to, sort of squash your feelings. to sort of shut it down, and how much you can hurt other people and yourself by doing that. The people in the song are just continuously telling themselves they don't feel what they do feel, until the end when it's too late, and then they realize what they were really, really not ready for was, you know, never being able to see each other again. (From Storytellers) - There was this period where I got really really sick of playing music and I saved up some money from landscaping and I bought a backback and some boots and me and a friend got tickets and went over to Europe. Just to backpack around Europe. It was like the summer of 1989 and I ended up on this greek Island and I met this girl named Anna and I completly fell in love with her and I think vice versa.. which was a dumb thing to do in the middle of the summer on a greek island cause the girls from Australia and your from California..and the last thing, you should have is a fling, you know that the last thing you need to do is fall in love with a girl from Australia cause you don't have years you have weeks. You know and everyone goes home, and we were kids and plane tickets were to expensive. You can't change these things you know. And it was just really difficult you know because no one really wants to cop to how important they feel about it because it's a it's a hole your gonna fall into. So the song is really about denial, the characters in the song keep saying to each other "No, you know I'm not ready for this sort of thing" 'till the very end when it's too late. When they realize they weren't ready for the loss. "... And it's a terrible thing to find out because it's too late, which is what it ended up being at that point and... it's funny she's married now and she's got a kid and she still lives in Sydney. I still talk to her every once in a while, not too much but, and whenever I talk to her she says that she still loves this song, and I do too... and this is Anna Begins..." Re: The line: Her Kindness Bangs a Gong: It means the way she made me feel struck my heart and made it ring like a bell (or a gong) Time & Time again Back to the Top - A weird song, a wasteland song. It's about the spaciousness of loneliness, equating solitariness with the hugeness of the country. It's about large geographic locations and the protagonist's wish to be displaced in them. Adam: "It's kinda, you know, a nihilistic song, it's almost like someone gets frustrated with...you know, I was thinking of the desert, east of California, and just leaving people and ending up...trying to fly as fast as you can towards something else, and the desire at times to sort of rid yourself of that numbness and that emptiness that you get when you're in the middle of something too big, and in the song the person just has the desire to destroy, wishes he can burn it all down, and take himself with it probably." Rain king Back to the Top (From Storytellers): 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 ho w 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. Sullivan Street Back to the Top My last girlfriend, for the first month and a half that we were going out, her mother was living with her, and her mother's very Catholic. We couldn't spend the night together, so I was constantly making these drives in the middle of the night -- very surreal, four in the morning, falling asleep. I really believed in the relationship, but when I was writing this song, the lyrics came out: "Pretty soon I won't come around". It wasn't what I wanted -- I didn't want it to end -- but there it was. It's about the inevitability of leaving. Ghost Train Back to the Top (From Storytellers:) 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 on e point he thought he might ride it. Raining In Baltimore Back to the Top It's a rare song about being 50 miles from nowhere and wanting to be somewhere else with someone that you miss -- but also realizing that you set this situation up for yourself. This is the saddest, bitterest song on the record for me. As a listener, you're supposed to realize that even though he wishes he is far away, he set it up like that. It's probably easier for him to be miserable and far away. A Murder Of One Back to the Top I can remember being eight years old and having infinite possibilities. But life ends up being so much less that we thought it would be when we were kids, with relationships that are so empty and stupid and brutal. If you don't find a way to break the chain and change in some way, then you wind up, as the rhyme goes: a murder of one, for sorrow. Back