365 project:"open up your eyes, you can see the flames of your wasted life. you should be ashamed"

80.

artist:counting crows
album:august and everything after

this might be the CD with which i have the most history. i owned the cassette, and bought it shortly after it came out back in 1993. i remember sitting in the passenger's seat of my mom's dodge caravan waiting at the elementary school for my younger brothers and sister to come out of the building and hearing Mr. Jones for the first time. i remember hearing it subsequent times and getting really excited every time. i saved up some cash that i made babysitting and went to the store with dad and bought the cassette. i was so excited to own it.

this is an album that i really like to sit and listen to from beginning to end, especially on a darker, moodier day. it starts with silence, ends with silence, and the stories it tells in between that silence are ones that i have carried with me for the last 18 years. not to mention the fact that throughout all of this time, the song Anna begins has resounded with me as one of the most haunting, heartbreaking, beautiful bodies of work i have ever had the pleasure of hearing. i would almost guarantee that my love of dark, sad, moody songs comes directly from my love for that song.

I'm listening to this version currently, and it is giving me chills. if a song ever had the power to break my heart and twist my insides into knots, its this one. this video has no picture, but i think that in this case it would take away from the emotion in the song.

obviously i didn't listen to this album on cassette today. at some point during college i was hanging out on south street with some of my friends. i distinctly remember being with kaite and Jaime, so i must have been with some of my roommates, too. at any rate, there was a record store along the street, and we stopped in as one of our last stops of the night (i remember it being dark when we were leaving. i also remember someone in a leather jacket sitting on the steps). as i was poking around through the Cd's i stumbled upon a used copy of august and everything after. i paid about five dollars for it, as it had been out 8 or 9 years by that point, and another 9 or 10 years later i had to skip a few songs and through a few other parts of the CD because its so scratched up and loved in some spots that it will no longer play. it might be time to invest in another copy.

counting crows are one of my top three favorite bands. this is my favorite album of theirs. by that reasoning, its one of my favorite albums. i don't think there is a part of the entire record that I'm not totally in love with. they are my favorite songs to hear live. i think counting crows were the first band that i learned to love without my parents' influence (they have a lot of influence on my musical taste) and therefore they will always have a special place in my heart.