Einstein On The Beach — Counting Crows

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsW1rdT-K2w

One more sun comes sliding down the sky

One more shadow leans against a wall

This is a song out of nowhere — not off a best-selling album by a best-selling band, but a rarities mix — it made it to the charts, to the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks number-one single position. It's not related to the opera of the same name. It's not overtly about anything, it's not eminently decipherable. The song was an outtake from August and Everything After. It never should have made it big.

I knew, at first listen, it was golden. I think it's about Albert Einstein (of course) and his uncertainty for his contributions to the a-bomb, for his own personal triumphs and failures. I think it's a careful meditation on the psyche of a man the band hardly knew — so, a fictionalized version, but one that is just as meaningful. The lyrics are clear — he has that capacity to do great or terrible things, and it's ripping him apart — he'll get help, but he'll never be together again.

Round Here — Counting Crows

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAe3sCIakXo

Another misplaces attachment to this song — I'm twenty-something, living in Boston, maybe, somewhere in the Northeast with warm buildings and a cold outdoors, maybe I'm postgrad or working, doesn't matter — I have a vision of just malaise, maybe from Good Will Hunting, and I'm not unhappy but I'm incomplete, the music's emptiness and the winter and this weird distant city, not my own New York but somewhere else; I go to concerts and the shows reflect it; it's a college town, but the college rock bands play 90s music, my god, I wasn't even alive in the 90s; this isn't my dream, this is somebody else's; this is the plot of Portlandia, except they're thrilled with it, and I'm dreaming; maybe this was a dream I had on that trip to Philadelphia? And this is the song — a complete life, cohesive and not without its benefits, but not mine, not mine at all.

Walkaways — Counting Crows

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDd9YVpkgO8

This is one of those songs that ended up bound to a certain time in my life — in this case, a weekend in 2008 or 09 when I went down to Philadelphia to visit my cousin in Wharton. We stayed in his unfurnished apartment and slept on air mattresses, and during the day went out and toured the city itself. It was a new city, and I was old enough to walk around by myself. It was raining up the promenade to the Philadelphia Art Museum, and suddenly I had this glimpse of what life would be like in the future — going to college and living somewhere different, living by myself or with new people. And I was young, and I had this album on my iPod, and somehow the two got linked. The song was about separation and a new city and so was that weekend — although, that weekend cast a tone on the weekends I would spend up in Boston, or at a friend's house in CT, or even whole summers in PA.  It was different and foreign and there was a strange joy in that, but also a sadness, like knowing that this would soon stop being an excursion from real life and start being it.

Counting Crows — St. Robinson In His Cadillac Dream

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6SEVMhwShQ

Whenever I talk about music with anyone over the age of about thirty, the idea of tonal shift always comes up: most music today has a great divide between the tone of its music and the tone of its lyrics. Modern music can be poppy and upbeat, and discuss sadness and loss. Often it's slow and sad but has hopeful and uplifting lyrics. The theory is that this is a new development, and I'm inclined to agree — it's hard to picture Ella Fitzgerald pulling this trick, (although not as hard to picture Sinatra); but Opera, Soul, Blues, R+B, modern Musicals, Rock 'n' Roll, not even Rap ever has real cognitive dissonance Yet modern Rock, and especially Alternative (call it Indie, whatever) does this a lot.

St. Robinson in His Cadillac Dream is the button song on the Counting Crows' 1999 album This Desert Life; a wonderful, flawed, expert rendition of Americana pop mixed with shoegaze. Yet it's a prime example: a sad, melancholy song put to poppy, heightened banjo, organ, and guitar. It leaves echoes of... uncertainty?

A wonderful example is The Cure, although I'm not sure that they began the trend — Plainsong is Robert Smith going off to write a secret love letter to his wife, shrouded in the timbre of the previously dark stuff The Cure had done earlier in the 80s. It became massively popular, an all-consuming emotional statement, as Pitchfork so puts it.

It sounds sad, but it's deeply happy. St. Robinson pulls the same trick. Most modern indie music pulls the same trick.

But why?