My Life In 35 Songs, Track 12: “Come Around” by Counting Crows

I have waited for tomorrow from December ‘til today, and I have started loving sorrow along the way.

“I’ll believe it exists when I’m holding it in my hands.”

For six months, I repeated those words to myself like they were a self-help mantra. I was talking about the supposedly brand-new album from Counting Crows, which was set to drop on March 25, 2008 after a long, long hiatus. The band had teased the LP the previous fall with the release of “Cowboys,” a loud, bitter, rip-roaring rocker that sounded like the reincarnated version of their 1996 cult classic Recovering the Satellites. I loved that sound and how energized it felt, but then again, I probably would have loved anything coming out of the Counting Crows camp at that point. In the moment, the band’s newest song was “Accidentally in Love,” the Oscar-nominated hit from 2004’s Shrek 2, and their newest album was 2002’s Hard Candy. They had, in other words, been away for a while.

I was convinced that I’d somehow cursed the Crows. As a kid, “Mr. Jones” was the first rock song I’d ever loved, and the band’s moody, melodic roots rock, for me, became synonymous with growing up. But I’d fallen head over heels in love with their music with the 2003 best-of collection Films About Ghosts, which recontextualized those ‘90s hits in exciting ways and unearthed a series of rich, remarkably written deep cuts – songs like the searching title track from Recovering the Satellites, the epic “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” from 1999’s This Desert Life, or the simultaneously sad and funny “Holiday in Spain” from Hard Candy – that made me realize there was probably a lot more to this band than what got played on the radio.

The Crows became the first band I ever did a full catalog deep dive for, even though their “full catalog” at that point only consisted of four studio albums, a greatest hits compilation, a two-disc live album, and a smorgasbord of b-sides. They were the band that taught me to love the craft of album making, and to appreciate how an artist could transform over the course of their career. The autumnal folk-rock of August & Everything After gave way to the loud, searing, bare-knuckle boxer that was Satellites, which in turn folded to the bright, road-trip-ready grab bag of Desert Life. My favorite, at the time, was Hard Candy, which took the band’s sound and refracted it through the lens of sugary, Skittle-colored pop production. That album had a wistful summertime feel to it that I just adored, and I remember listening to it over and over again in the summer of 2004, dreaming of what Counting Crows – at that point, my favorite band in the world – would cook up next.

I didn’t know that I’d be waiting the better part of four years to hear anything new. At that time, the Crows had followed an every-three-years release schedule since the start of their career, and I figured it was fair to assume the band would have something ready to put out into the world by the end of 2005. But 2005 came and went, and so did 2006, both with little to no activity from the band. Hearing “Cowboys” in the fall of ’07, with the promise of more new music to come the following year, was invigorating, but I was also skeptical – hence the “I’ll believe it when I have it” mindset that I carried with me right up until the new record, Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, showed up in my mailbox.

Unlike the other albums in the Counting Crows discography, Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is a big conceptual swing. The first half, Saturday Nights, is all loud rock guitars and reckless hedonism. The second half, Sunday Mornings, is the hangover – quiet, regretful, and filled with reflection and resolve to do better. The band worked with two producers from their past to give the two sides of the album distinctly different flavors. For Saturday Nights, they called in Recovering the Satellites producer Gil Norton, a veteran partner for bands like Pixies and Foo Fighters – bands that had a clear propensity to get loud. For Sunday Mornings, they rang up Brian Deck, who’d produced This Desert Life, as well as indie and folk records from the likes of Iron & Wine, Josh Ritter, and Modest Mouse.

On those first listens, I loved Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings without reservation. I loved the loud, thorny drunkenness of the first half, and I loved the “Counting Crows go indie” feel of the second. This was the era of iTunes and the “Top 25 Most Played” playlist, and half the songs from Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings quickly rocketed up my list, so often did I play the album in those first days and weeks. As far as I was concerned, my favorite band had come back with a bona-fide masterpiece.

The timing didn’t hurt things. This album dropped during the last week before spring break, and I needed a vacation badly. After the whirlwind of High School Musical and my busy-every-second fall, I felt like I’d spent the winter receding into hibernation mode. I was exhausted and bereft at the same time, relieved to be past the most chaotic period of my life up to that point, but also, I think, grieving the loss of something that had been so exciting and emotionally intense. Looking back, I was probably experiencing some low-grade form of depression. It got to the point where I was blowing off my friends, not applying myself in school, and just generally not enjoying my youth in the way youth is meant to be enjoyed. I was in a funk, and I needed something to shake me out of it.

I found what I was looking for in “Come Around,” the final song on Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, and by far the most optimistic. Where much the album’s second half is downbeat and bleary-eyed, the closer is a ringing anthem about dusting yourself off and getting back in the fight. It had some messages I desperately needed to hear, and it arrived in exactly the week I needed to hear them.

“I have waited for tomorrow from December ‘til today/And I have started loving sorrow along the way.” Crows frontman Adam Duritz sings those words in the second verse of this song, and I consider them to be right up there with the most important lyrics in my life. Hearing those words broke through the wall I was building around myself and screamed at me to take a look at my life and smell the roses.

I remember the first night of spring break: spending the evening out with friends, getting up to dumb hijinks, doing what you’re supposed to do when you’re 17. When I got back to my car late that evening to drive home, I put on “Come Around” and it punched me in the gut. I had spent the preceding three months becoming bedfellows with sorrow, and I had been waiting for a day when the weather would break – and the monotony of the winter along with it – so that I could finally avail myself of all the opportunities I’d been letting pass me by. I swore to myself that night, in the car, that I was going to be better: more present, more engaged, more willing to seize the day. I was going to come around.

Those were important resolutions for me to make. That spring ended up dotted with some of my favorite memories from high school, and the coming summer and everything that would happen over the course of those months would ultimately do a whole lot to shape the person I am today. I wasn’t done with sorrow, but I was done with hiding from the world. Next time, the hurdles would come because I was out living my life, taking chances, and making mistakes, not because I was sitting on the sidelines and watching everything pass me by. “Come Around” – this big, bold breakup song about looking on the bright side and finding the strength to move on after heartbreak – gave me the kick in the ass to get back in the driver’s seat of my own life and live it. I’ll always be thankful it did.

Counting Crows themselves didn’t come around much after that. It’s been 17 years since this album, and the band has only released 18 new original songs in the interim, across two long-in-gestation albums: 2014’s Somewhere Under Wonderland and this year’s Butter Miracle. Count the 2012 covers record Underwater Sunshine and the band’s since-2008 output swells to 33 songs. Needless to say, it’s not much music in the context of an industry which now regularly serves up albums with that many tracks in a single go.

If you subscribe to the (relatively common) belief that the Crows lost their fastball after the ‘90s, you’re probably not worried about the relative drought of new material. The band still tours regularly, and there’s plenty of nostalgia for those first 2-3 records to go around. “A Long December” has even been reclaimed as a Christmas song, which means it will probably come back into the zeitgeist every single year for the rest of time. Counting Crows could rest on the laurels of their early work for as long as they continue to operate as a band, and they would be fine. But I have personally always wished there was more music from that latter period, and it’s mostly because of “Come Around.” I love “A Long December” as much as the next person. Ditto for “Round Here,” “Anna Begins,” “Angels of the Silences,” “Colorblind,” and all the band’s most beloved songs. But if I had to name my favorite Counting Crows song, it would be this one – this beautiful, life affirming song that takes a breakup and recasts it as a rebirth.

“Have you seen the little pieces of the people we have been?” Duritz asks at the beginning of this song, envisioning his broken self as grains of a scattering dust, blowing off on the breeze. It’s a sad image, but this isn’t a sad song. Because somehow, by the bridge, Duritz has found the will and the resolve to tape himself back together and face the world again. “After I’ve been missing for a while/And you hear that summer’s song,” he sings as the track barrels into its final act, as if the first hint of a summer sun and the radiant sound of a bright, optimistic anthem were all he needed to give life another try. Well, thanks to this song, I am living proof that those things sometimes really are all you need to save you.

Past Installments: