MILB: "Round Here" by Counting Crows

You know, sometimes there is a band that releases an album that they really had no business releasing.  Nothing they do afterwards lives up to how good the first album is, and while some of their past songs are great, it never reaches as high as the first one.  Bush have this with "16 Stone".  Counting Crows, while releasing some great music in the past, never once have reached the total awesomeness of August and Everything After, released 20 years ago this September.

"Round Here" is probably one of my favorite, and most maddening, Counting Crows songs.  It has some fantastic lyrics, and some really lazy ones as well.  The music is very simple and quiet, with the beginning like an organ that slowly grows in sound.  Then a guitar enters playing a broken chord that plays as the backbone of the song.  It's very powerful.

The lyrics, as I said previously, can be quite amazing.  The frontman, Adam Duritz, explained that the song is about a guy leaving a woman, and everything behind, and realizing that he's just losing himself as well.  Then comes the greatest line in the song:

"Round here we talk just like lions, but we sacrifice like lambs."

The imagery of that is amazing.  He then of course follows up later in the song with the laziest lyric in the song:

"Round here we stay up very very very very late."

Wow.

Anyways, the rest of the song is brilliant, and you can hear the emotion Duritz' voice as he sings it.  This song meant a lot to me in 1993-1994, as did this entire album.  I was just about to graduate from High School and move 879 miles away to Washington, DC.  It definitely spoke to me, and it's something that's always stayed with me.

Even now I listen to it and it has meaning.  August 2, 2013 will be our 2nd year anniversary in South Africa.  Listening to it makes me think back to everything that's happened over the past two years and realizing that lots has happened and that we don't always have time.  Listen to the song, and then the rest of August and Everything After.  "Anna Begins" is fantastic, and "Mr. Jones" is a classic as well.  But also listen to "Time and Time Again" and "Sullivan Street."  Duritz was trying to be Bob Dylan, and it's not a bad effort.