Seasons of Churn: August and Everything Remastered
Minutes tick away and I have planned and re-planned this day at last count at least six counts. I’m now writing about an album I had no plan to write about, listening to an album I had no plan on buying yet somehow it wound up underneath the doormat of my Huntsville apartment. I’m listening to this album and realize I won’t be able to do another thing until I write this and say whatever it is I think I have to say at this very moment.
I didn’t even know August and Everything After was being re-released until I read Tom Johnson’s Breakdown column. Counting Crows were a tough sell for me. Adam Duritz’s voice and public persona were real turnoffs for me. “Mr. Jones” seemed like a joke, a novelty and I was far too cool to embrace that nonsense. The absurdity of that statement and my mindset is only properly understood when you consider I thought Bad English’s Backlash was a great album.
It wasn’t until I went to UNA, a couple years after the album’s original release, that I came around on Counting Crows and spent a fair amount of time listening to a handful of these August songs. August begat Recovering the Satellites and I was hooked… for awhile.
August has since become something of a ’90s alternative classic, one of those MTV Buzz Bin records that we all owned. I’d tell people I like it but hadn’t dusted off the record and actually listened to it in ages and could only actually remember a couple of the songs anymore.
When I found out about the re-mastered and expanded edition, I was overwhelmed by a compulsion to buy it. I was reduced to a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal, drooling over the shiny. I relented and ordered it yesterday and up until the moment when I actually opened the package contemplated returning it because it was a $24 impulse buy. Could it really be any better than the dust-gathering original version I have sitting on my CD tower a few feet behind me? Am I ever going to listen to any of the bonus material? How many times?
I finally told myself, “Fuck it. You bought it,” and opened the package.
I don’t know if the original master sounds bad or dated, but this new version sounds spectacular. The songs are better than I remember. It cost me $24 to remember to listen to a record I already have and actually like. What makes that all the more perverse is that I feel like I got a bargain..
There is something perverse about spending $24 to buy an album I already own to remember how much I like it which is made only more perverse by the fact it now feels like money well spent.
Filed under: Tags: Counting Crows, Seasons of Churn
