Member-only story
A Drive Through the Counting Crows
What Music Speaks, part four
The Counting Crows’ debut album August and Everything After was released on September 14, 1993, nine months and eleven days after I gave birth to my first child, a daughter; cone of head, tan of skin. One month after I moved from the Bay Area the only home I’d ever known to Los Angeles, a place I’d never known, with that same daughter in tow; head no longer coned, skin still tanned.
August and Everything After has a yellow-burnt orange cover with a scrawl of handwritten lyrics of a song of the same name running across the background. In the foreground is an ink-heavy scrawl that black-bleeds the name of the band in colossal letters and below that — in much smaller letters — the album title, as if the band was announcing themselves, more so than the album. Which, perhaps they were.
For me, the color of this album will forever be the color of this band. Just the same way that you will forever remember the perfume or cologne your first love always wore and whenever you come across that scent, no matter how much time has passed or how many loves have come in-between, there they are.
For me, the color of this album will forever be the color of this band.
