It was 1994.
Summer. My brother had been dead since early fall '93...
I was living through Hell. Or so my 19 year old heart believed it to be. Hindsight makes one realize it wasn't as bad as it may have felt. But man, it fucking sucked.
Other than listening to Prince no other music that was new was making me happy. And I couldn't listen to the music I already loved because it all made me think of how much everything sucked. Whether it was thinking of my brother or the shit relationships I was in, everything just sucked. And I started digging into older music. Ray Charles. Dr John. Funkadelic, David Bowie. I was finding new in old.
And then I heard "'Round Here".
And I'm not going to lie and act like I was a huge Counting Crows fan. I never was and I'm still not, "Mr. Jones" was a pretty big hit for them and I just couldn't get into it, but that summer, "Round Here" hit the radio and I heard my friends.
I heard the life I was living. It was a new song that made me think about my friends and myself and the things we were going through and the people we wanted to be with, and the people we wanted to be. And it just made me feel good and broke my heart at the same time.
There was this coffee shop that I worked at with Tricky called coffee company, Tricky's Uncle Vic owned it. And I remember the first time I heard the song I was sitting in the parking lot in my car and the song just hit me so hard. About 2 months ago I stumbled across this version of the song on YouTube and it just blew me away and it brought me right back to that heartbreakingly sad yet wonderful time between teen and adult, between angst and understanding sadness, between loving and loss. And it felt like an anthem for what suburban kids would lose as we became Gen X adults. I'm still not a really big Counting Crows fan. But this song and this version that I stumbled the cross hits hard.
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