New Counting Crows Single

All my friends and lovers can assure you that I love and hate Adam Duritz like I love and hate myself. The release of August and Everything After was revelatory for me as a lonely and unhappy seventh grader, and it was more or less the unchallenged soundtrack for my life until almost the end of high school. It's not hard for me to track my life against subsequent Counting Crows releases, each one characterizing both a different period of my life and a different delicate balance of optimism and self-loathing. They're all committed to memory, even the songs hardly anyone listened to.

This is pretty much the thing that most clearly marks me as wretchedly uncool, but there's just no escaping it.

I only bring it up because there's a new Counting Crows single out this week, along with another pair of free songs from the upcoming new album. News of a new Counting Crows album always feels me with dread, as for a long time the band has been inching closer and closer to just releasing 13 tracks of Adam Duritz weeping into the microphone. In the five and a half years since the last album came out, their biggest hit has been the absolutely terrible "Accidentally in Love" from the Shrek II soundtrack, which doesn't fill me with confidence either.



Still, although it dances as Duritz so often does right on the edge of self-parody, this song may actually hit that Counting-Crows sweet-spot deep inside my lame, lame heart. I'll only know for sure after I've listened to it a few hundred more times.