The Price of a Memory: Counting Crows, Emotional Recall, and How I Spent My Summer Vacation

While undergoing the process of filling out statement of purpose essays, autobiographical statements, cover letters, and other assorted requirements for graduate school applications, I find myself needing a steady diet of outlets to push my energy. Granted, while applications are not hard work, I'm discovering that after three years of waiting to hear on job applications before ultimately meeting rejection for big-kid job after job after job, I have gained something of an anxiety with a regards towards finding acceptance. This is nothing new for any twentysomething of this generation: most of us are so used to dealing with failure that success comes as something of a surprise when it finally rears its gilded head. This anxiety has led to my second-guessing nearly everything involved in my applications; whether it be the writing samples I'm providing or the aforementioned statements of my artistic purpose. It's not so much an anxiety that locks me into what I'm doing so much as a newfound way for depression to manifest itself: this school rejects a thousand applicants each year, what's the point? will they even think I'm qualified for teaching? how can I afford this shit, even if I do get in? is this how I really want to commit myself for the rest of my life? is it too late to throw it all away and just start a band?

And so I turn to these outlets to let out my creative anxieties, which are fairly neutered by this by-the-numbers process I've engaged in. The first way is by writing for the Addison Recorder, which is fun in its own way. I get to write about topical subjects I love, a couple dozen people read about it, and life is good. Other ways include working on the outline for my next book. Another way is breaking down As You Like It so that I can turn it into a show next summer.

And then there's the music.

If you know me at all, you know that I somehow missed out on the Counting Crows boat for most of my life, failing to discover them until I turned 24. But as soon as I did, through a clip of the Best Musical Performances of SNL, it was love at first sight. Listening to "Round Here" for the first time actively gave me chills. I remember sitting in my darkened living room, wondering who the hell this guy was with dreadlocks, while becoming enraptured in the vocals of the song. Here was the band I've been looking for all my life, I remember thinking. These guys get it; they know what music is, and what it means to be a band.

(Caveat: I know the gripes against C.C., and that Adam Duritz and his lyrics have a tendency to come across as whiny and self-absorbed. But let's be fair here, I needed to hear these things at that particular point in my life. Plus, they're pretty good at what they do.)

Since finding them, I've devoured their entire discography, and in the midst of being young and broke in the city, pined at being unable to afford tickets for their most recent tour. (When they come around again, make no mistake, I will be there, come hell or high water.) I've been rolling over their songs time and time again (pun intended), listening for new things on each subsequent play. It's no surprise that if I ever go to a karaoke night with friends, I'm probably singing at least one C.C. song. While this may turn out to be a phase of my life that I look back on in ten years and laugh at, I'm enjoying the hell out of it at the moment.

At the moment, I'm embroiled in the midst of their third album, This Desert Life (1999). While my favorite songs do come from their first album, the seminal August and Everything After (1993), as a complete whole, TDL is (at this exact moment in time) my favorite album as a complete entity. Sure, August is fantastic (always), Recovering the Satellites (1996) is more rocking than anything else they have, Hard Candy (2002) is technically brilliant, etc., but there's something about TDL that I just love. Its sense of completeness as a study of dreams. Its melodic composition, the band working in perfect unison. Its perfect backdrop being speeding along a desert highway at night, stars in the sky, windows down, minds drifting over the horizon.

Or something like that.

For me (as for most people I would imagine), listening to music involves emotional recall. There are some songs where I can only imagine listening to them in one singular location. Most of the music I love, however, evokes a sense of feeling, rather than a specific place. That feeling might be from a particular moment in time (listening to Third Eye Blind on the bus to middle school) or from being in a certain place (why I associate Iz with working at Borders), but it's a powerful feeling, and why I love listening to music and especially to Counting Crows. What follows is my attempt to describe what the twelve tracks on This Desert Life inspire in me. More for kicks than anything else.

(Sidenote: I think one reason I like this album the best is because of the cover art and booklet. Featuring art by Dave McKean, the album cover is adapted from his jacket for Neil Gaiman's "The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish", and each song is accompanied by McKean's trademark surrealist imagery. Favorite band, favorite author, I knew there was a reason this was my favorite album at this moment in time!)

1. "Hanginaround"

Obviously, this one makes me wish I was still in a band.  I do miss the days of hanging out backstage at The Attic. At the same time, this reminds me of Saturdays after parties in college, the days when we weren't hungover, but felt like getting Pita Pit or pizza out somewhere. Waffle House or Big Boy in the early am hours also comes to mind, the times where it felt like a party and everyone was just laughing the entire time. Nostalgia, in other words.

2. "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby"

This is a Top 5 Counting Crows' song for me. It always feels for me like the start of a road trip, heading out of Ohio to visit Chicago/Cleveland/California/wherever. There's a trace of something being left behind for me, if not carrying along everything with me. Because "there's a piece of Maria in every song that I sing..."

3. "Amy Hit the Atmosphere"

This is my least favorite song on the album, but it's still good. I just don't have any particularly strong associations with it. The most I can come up with is falling asleep on one of the seats in the van that we took on a road trip to Idaho. I hadn't yet listened to this song (or album) before that trip, and didn't acquire it until afterwards, but the moment that strikes it home for me is the wistful background vocals behind the second verse. That's what the space between waking and dreaming feels like: breaking out of one song into an entirely different piece of music.

4. "Four Days"

There's a windmill farm on I-65 between mile markers 191 and 205 that I would normally drive through in the dark on my way between Chicago and Dayton. To me, that's what this song is: the phantom space between departure and destination, filled with promises on either end. "Have you seen Ohio rise?"

5. "All My Friends"

There have been many dances I've attended in my lifetime, be they proms or masques, formals or weddings. This song, while never likely to crack the rotation anywhere, is to me being surrounded by my closest friends, dancing and spinning our way into the night, everyone lost in a trance that borders on poetic. These are moments that I wish would last forever, not associated with any particular conversation, but more on a sense of closeness. It's a feeling that can only arise spontaneously, without any impetus of creation.

6. "High Life"

This is walking back home from the rec center during the months I was trying to get back into shape (and succeeded for a brief time before I caught mono and the whole thing went to pot). At the time, I was somewhat lost in my own personal wasteland, trying to figure out what the next year of my life would be like, making sense of classes and relationships, and what was important to me. It's the time where I started to really trust in just letting things happen without working towards any specific goals; not letting go and trusting to the wind, more like keeping my head above water and trusting in life to take me in a specific direction. This practice worked out at the time, and has had repeated benefits of jolting me whenever my life particularly needed a burst of new energy.

7. "Colorblind"

The mopey-R.E.M. style song to me is pulling off at the first exit in Indiana, just past the Ohio border, on I-70, finding a Speedway to fill up my tank. Drifting along Route 40 in the dark, looking at the lit-up, empty fast-food joints, I started contemplating emptiness and vacancy and its role in my life. You know, the sad-sack, depressed shit you're supposed to think about while listening to stuff like this.

8. "I Wish I Was A Girl"

Having the ability to tell someone that you're "doin' alright these days" when you're really not is something I've mastered over the years. Anytime someone asks me how things are going and I say things are good, there's a 10 to 1 shot that I'm lying to them. These last three songs are all about making a change in your life and the necessity that brings that about. Or maybe that's what I'm projecting onto these songs. (Hmm. Topical.) Either way, for me, this brings to mind deciding to take a break from life, the universe, and everything last March, finding a plane ticket for the cheap and making my way out to California. It also brings back to memory the week right before I left for Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp's 2005 International Jazz Tour, saying good-bye to high school just in time to pack up and leave for Europe. If I could go back and travel Europe, I'd go nuts. As it is, I'm not at a point in my life where I can do that; all my savings went to college and to my internship in New Jersey. That being said, one of these days, backpacking across the country is going to happen again.

9. "Speedway"

For some reason, I can never remember the title of this song, even though it's one of my favorite tracks on the album. Like before, it comes with needing to make a trip/change/difference, only it lies in stasis instead. There's a lot of nights where I've lived this song by lying awake in bed, thinking about needing to get out and make something of myself, but not quite having the drive to do it. AKA, much of summer 2011. (There's a reason that I fell head over heels in love with this band that summer, you know.)

10. "St. Robinson in his Cadillac Dream"

Completing the album's cycle of dreams and movement through inertia, this song brings to mind a very specific time and place for me. It's high school, somewhere in spring 2004, and my friend and I are walking back from lunch to class. My friend stops, whispers my name, and nods towards the front doors, beckoning the idea of cutting the last half of the school day and just getting out and driving. Me being far too responsible for my own good at the time, I shot down the idea. If I instead take her up on the idea and we bolt out the door, this song is the soundtrack to wherever we end up and to whatever adventures we end up going on. There's a small part of me that believes that if we do cut school that day, my life changes in some way that I'll never quite know about. All I can do is dream of driving away in a bright blue Cadillac through the sky.

Anyway, these are some of the things I'm thinking about rather than working on a statement of purpose concerning why I should attend the University of Michigan's creative writing program. At this time, I'm putting in August and Everything After: Live at Town Hall in an attempt to fall asleep once again. But know that I'm dreaming "of ballerinas and I don't know why, but I see Cadillac's sailing..."