CD Review: Counting Crows - Hard Candy
Hard Candy
"This is a song about looking in a drawer and finding a photograph of someone, and all of a sudden remembering. I found a photograph in a drawer of my old girlfriend wearing this silly yellow hat out at Jones Beach in Long Island. We were playing there. Our first date had been out at Jones Beach the night before at a Neil Young concert, and our second date was at our show out there. In the afternoon this friend of mine took this picture of her by the water. I hadn't seen her in a long time, but I was looking at the picture and remembering that weekend in New York.
In fact, that's really a theme for this whole album.
"That's right. I didn't really notice it until afterwards. I spent a lot of this past year more locked away than I ever have been. I didn't go out, I just worked on the record, I didn't have much of a social life. So the album is very much about memory. 'Hard Candy' is memory -- this sweet thing that you can relive, but it hurts, especially in this case. It's just the same hard candy that you're remembering again."
American Girls
"I was just trying to write a song that was a little humorous in a way, about the difficulty in understanding the other sex and in having anything work. It's just about a boy who meets this kind of crazy girl outside of a club one night. They start going out, even though he figures he could have been just anybody who could have gotten her in. It wasn't really a function of anything special about him. After a while he begins to take her for granted, and then one day she's gone. That really freaks him out."
Closets, in this song, seem to have a particular meaning.
"The idea of 'she comes out of closets' I knew I was going to use it later in the song, for the twist in the third verse. But also, I wanted him to look at her revealing more of herself, opening herself more up to him. For him, that's his own fucked-up thing, her opening up to him. He looks at her as if she keeps bringing out private shames as opposed to just opening up to each other."
Good Time
"I wrote this as a really beautiful piano song, but I never wanted it to be on piano. I always had it in my head that it was this Isaac Hayes kind of song, like a Counting Crows version of something from Hot Buttered Soul. This song was really difficult for us. I could play it for everyone, then I had to say, 'It sounds nothing like this. This isn't the song. This is just the music for the song.' We tried so many permutations to get it that way, starting with ditching the piano, before we worked out the rhythm section part, which is basically a funk/soul, early Seventies thing."
What's this one about?
"It's about the difficulty with just feeling okay, and how hard it is to cross the gulf from one person to another, just so you could feel good. It seems like the simplest thing, but it's so hard to get across that hole between people. I use the words 'Good Time' because it seems more poignant to fall short of such a simple thing."
If I Could Give All My Love ( Richard Manuel is Dead )
"This song is about someone thinking about his life passing him by … well, it's about me thinking about my life passing me by. I was looking back on this relationship of mine that was gone. A long time ago I was coming home from being out all night, drinking with this girl and some friends. Me and the girl came back to my house; this was when I lived in Berkeley. It was about 6:30 in the morning, so the paper was there. I went inside and looked through it before crashing, and it said that Richard Manuel [of the Band] had died; he hung himself in a hotel room in Florida. I just sat there at seven in the morning, still pretty wasted, thinking how impermanent things were. I remember thinking that you just can't let things slip by you, because one day they're gone. The girls that you can't get your act together for, they go off and marry other people. People die. Life is not sitting around, waiting for you."
You start this reflective song with a catchy, upbeat guitar lick.
"That's about just aching to let it out. Each chorus starts off with that line: 'If I could give all my love to you ...' It's not until the second line that he adds this caveat: "… but I can't."
Goodnight L.A.
"It's about insomnia and loneliness. I had this really bad period of insomnia while we were making this record, where it was almost physically dangerous. I started not sleeping for three or four days at a time, and then passing out for eight hours, and then being up for a couple more days. You start to go crazy after a while, it was sort of nightmarish, but sort of beautiful too. Life becomes very hallucinatory without sleep and I think the song plays into that. The mind wanders before settling upon the one focused thought in the song."
What are you most happy with in this song?
"I was really into honing that perfect turn of phrase in this song. To me, it seems like you could just pour details into something, and the feeling comes out, so I don't always encapsulate things into a specific phrase. But on this song, for once, I really accomplished that: 'What brings me down is love, because I never get enough.'"
Butterfly In Reverse
"That's a line from one of Ryan Adams' million song fragments. I just started to write this song about my friend Mary-Louis and how great she was. I had the chorus, the 'Marianne' part. I had the music for the verses. Charlie [Gillingham] helped me out and wrote the music for the bridge. I couldn't figure out how to get into the bridge, and I couldn't figure out how to get out of the song. So one day Ryan came over to the studio. We're hanging out, and I started playing part of it to him and singing it to him. He loved it, and he came up with the music we were missing. Then I said, 'You know, I'm still stuck for lyrics.' I played him the chorus. I had the first line of the first verse, which was, 'Had a lot of girlfriends, I should have known then.' Ryan goes immediately, 'Omigod, it's a great line!' 'What?' 'Had a lot of girlfriends, I should have known them.' I pointed out that I hadn't said that. He pointed out that what I had said didn't make any sense. The whole song took about 15 minutes after that. It ends up being a song about whatever Ryan and I were thinking at that moment, but it started as a song about my friend, so I always think of it that way."
Who came up with the title?
"I did sort of, even though it's his lyric. He said there were two lines that he'd had forever: 'click your heels and count to ten,' and 'butterfly in reverse again.' It started out with him going, 'click your heels and count back from three.' I said, 'You should have known that the butterfly in reverse is me!' And he's like, 'Yes! I finally got it into a song!'
Miami
"At one point, my girlfriend went overseas for a long time while I was on tour. She came back to meet me; we were at Miami, and she was flying in for the last few days of the tour, and then we were going to move in together. It's about sitting there in the airport, completely dying to see her. I'd spent the day on the beach, and I felt pretty good about things in life. The sun was setting. I could see the plane landing. It was incredibly beautiful, and all of a sudden I get this feeling of doom or something in the pit of my stomach -- terror. It's like, I've been waiting for her, and I'm not gonna be happy until she gets home. By the same token, I couldn't fuck anything up until she got home. Relationships with other people, intimacy, those sorts of things, I find them really hard. I don't relate to other people very well. That's what the song is about. "It looks like darkness to me drifting down into Miami."
But there's an optimistic spin in the final section: "Let's go shut it down in New Orleans."
"I don't think I generally write too many one-note songs; they tend to have sadness and hope. This one's no different. He shakes it off. Basically he says 'Fuck it, let's see how this turns out.'"
New Frontier
"It's about the plasticity of the world, about how hard it is to get 'from the outside of everything to the inside of you,' which is sort of the point of all this in the first place. I wrote this in the style of an Eighties pop song, but really drivin', really rockin'." It's this guy in London talking about 'the purest aluminum people,' and 'no one gets a word that I say.' You go through that verse, thinking that it's a big, meaningful thing about not being understood.' And answer is that in England they say aluminium instead of aluminum. I just wanted it to take some of the steam out of the heavier parts of the record.
In the end, though, he chooses not to go home with the girl who corrects his pronunciation.
Different Girl. The girl in the second verse is my friend Galen. The girl in the third verse is a lover. She offers him the thing he always wanted and he stills doesn't take it. " I picture him standing on the edge of the flat earth, and he says, 'You know what? I'm just gonna step off walk and see what's out there.' That's the choice you make sometimes. It's a choice that leads you into not necessarily the happiest days or the most sleep-filled nights. You end up thinking more about your memories than you do what you did today."
Carriage
"This song is about how you go from being the most important person in someone's life one day to being utterly meaningless on another day. That's the weirdest thing about splitting up with people: It's not that you love each other but you can't deal with being together; it's like, how do you go from being the person they made love to, to this sterile position outside of that? I tried to write about the perils of actually caring for other people, because they come and they go, and that leaves you with yet another new hole. Specifically, it's about an ex-girlfriend who got pregnant when we slept together long after we had broken up. She got pregnant and we decided to keep it even though we were still split up. Later, she had a miscarriage, and the song examines our lives in the wake of that."
Why did you include a solo trumpet on this track?
"I got the idea from an Elvis Costello album called Punch The Clock. There's a song called 'Shipbuilding' on there, and he had Chet Baker play trumpet on it. It was this ghostly thing -- beautiful, sad. I wanted something like that, something that was like somebody crying. I couldn't think of any other instrument that did that as well. One of my house mates, Andre Carter, played the trumpet, which kills me."
Black and Blue
"'Black and Blue' is about the fragility of people. It's not necessarily about the girl doing all these things to herself as much as about her imagining doing all these things to herself. I didn't want to write a big song about suicide or anything; it's really a song about being so sad that you sit around and think about suicide, which I think people do all the time. That's why it says, in the last verse, 'tell yourself, or we’ll read a note that says, "I'm sorry everyone. I'm tired of feeling nothing. Goodbye."' It's about her imagining everybody reading the note. It's about her thinking about all these things she'd do to herself, and it's also him thinking about it. It seemed to me that thinking about it was much smaller and much sadder than actually dong it.
Who is this song really about?
" I couldn't tell, when I was writing the song, whether I was talking about … me … or this girl."
Why Should You Come When I Call?
"How do you solve that problem, when you're sitting alone by yourself in the middle of the night? In this song, it's about booty calls, and it's about phone sex. It's about … why would anyone come? The guy is saying, 'I'm completely worthless. Why should you come when I call?'"
Even so, there's an upbeat vibe to the song.
"This is our original demo, which was really spirited and had a ton of feeling; it was a hell of a live recording. We went back and every single person spent the rest of the day throwing background harmony ideas at it. We did it all in the control room, with the music playing out of speakers -- tons of leakage. Singing harmonies in front of people with headphones on, you sound stupid; we were all laughing at each other. It was really fun. As our booty calls etc."
Up All Night (Frankie Miller Goes to Hollywood)
"This guy doesn't have connections to other people. He's imagining a place where there was this camaraderie, where everything was cool and obvious. But he can't get there. The last verse says, 'If you don't come through, I wouldn't wait for you. I understand that everyone goes disappearing into that greater gray.' He's talking about a specific person, but also about everybody. You can't depend on other people. He dreams about it, he wants to do it, but he keeps letting them go. He doesn't grab onto anything; it's partly his own fault."
The chorus seems almost to celebrate that "it's too late to get high."
"I'm past the point in my life where I'm going to be able to solve my problems by getting high. There's a point where it's fun, then there's a point where it ain't gonna do you any good anymore. It's too late for that to be any kind of an answer. It's too late for all of those things that are going to make you feel good for a moment, whether it's getting high or stepping off the end of the world or calling a girl in the middle of the night or staring at photographs. It does mean you don't wish it would work."
Holiday in Spain
"It's just about a guy who's really hung over. He's tired, but it's like, don't feel bad; it looks like a nice day. It's a beautifully earthy song, because there's shit all over the house. There's not much left in the fridge except for a banana. They can clean it up, or they can get the hell out of town."
The lyrics juxtapose the grit in life against something more elusive.
"I was sitting around, flipping through my songbooks, looking for lyrics to cover songs, when I found the lyrics to 'Holiday in Spain.' I had written them about a month before; they were all mixed up, out of order. I had forgotten to record the music or write down the chord pattern, so I didn't have any idea how the song went. I was exhausted, but I started playing this really pretty chord progression, and I started singing that melody with those lyrics. And this song, which had been a dumb song about going out and drinking, turned into this really sad, beautiful song about having a hangover. All of a sudden, it made total sense."
