#14, “Round Here,” Counting Crows (1993)

150 Favorite Songs: #14, “Round Here,” Counting Crows (1993)

Here is my most embarrassing music take: I think Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz belongs on the short list of the greatest songwriters of all time. He can tell a complex, character-based story in a pop song with a literary quality to it as well as Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell. He can turn a phrase as well as Bob Dylan or Neil Young. He can write a pop hook as catchy as Paul McCartney. This is not an opinion I share lightly, but we are one hundred and thirty-six songs into this project, and I feel as though we have built some level of trust over that time.

I get why he is not regarded in the same light as those artists. The dreadlocks! The fact that his band’s most ubiquitous hits are probably the dreadful “Accidentally in Love” and a lamentable cover of Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” that you have definitely heard on the speakers every single time you’ve gone to the supermarket in the past fifteen years. If you’ve never really paid attention to these songs before, I can understand how a person could think that Counting Crows are, like, Train or something. (Train are very bad.) Train Guy could not write a line like “all at once you look across a crowded room / and see the way that light attaches to a girl” or write a narrative as sad and compelling as “Another Horsedreamer’s Blues.”

But we’re here to talk about “Round Here.” This is the first song off of the band’s first album, and it actually pre-dates Counting Crows, as Duritz took it with him when his previous band broke up. (The version up there comes from the band’s 1998 live album, Across A Wire, and it’s the loveliest recording of it, I think. If you’ve never heard the studio version before, you can play it here.)

“Round Here” is a narrative song, written in the first person but about a lot of people. It’s a little meandering, but in a way that captures the period in life the song is about—that liminal space between childhood and adulthood, where you are not just inventing yourself as the person you’ll grow into, but also you’re constantly around other people who are doing the same thing, and the way that being in that same position at the same time with other people makes you responsible to and for one another. The song is full of characters going through these things—the narrator, someone named Maria, a boy who looks like Elvis, a girl on a car in a parking lot, none of whom are really comfortable or stable in their lives. Duritz sings about all of them with compassion and unfolds a story about them finding one another at a time when their lives seem fairly aimless. They’ve got lots of time—to walk along the beach like they’re walking on a wire, to take their clothes off on the street after parking their cars, to contemplate how tired they feel they are of life in self-absorbed moments.

Then, in between those verses about these lost young people all Going Through It together, the song goes into its refrain. First, he repeats some of the lessons you learn as a child about how to behave as an adult (“stand up straight,” “carve out your name”), and then, as the song goes on, he rejects them the way a petulant child would. ‘round here, we’re never sent to bed early, he declares, boasting, ‘round here, we stay up very, very, very, very late. And I think about that line and what it means a lot, because it is such a funny line for an adult to sing, but that’s the whole point, because I think when you’re in the “Round Here” part of life—those years between, say, eighteen and twenty-four (the age Duritz was when he wrote it), you are still in many ways reacting to the things you were instructed to do as a child, the way you were taught to live. “Round Here” is, I think, about the realization that as an adult, you have the freedom to do whatever you want, that there is no one to tell you what to do, and also the counter-realization that the freedom to stay up as late as you want may be novel, but you have it because you are experiencing life without guardrails anymore, and all of the lost young people who make up the song’s verses are struggling a lot with that.

There’s so much going on in the song narratively, emotionally, and thematically that it’s easy to miss because Duritz invests himself so fully in the song that, I think, you can mistake the guilelessness of the narrator for immaturity from the songwriter. There’s a vulnerability to a lot of Counting Crows songs that I think is very special, and fairly unique; Bob Dylan is many things in his songs, but one thing he pretty much never is is vulnerable. Adam Duritz is willing to risk looking foolish and immature in his songs, to yearn for deeply uncool things (Bob Dylan would never have written a line like “I wanna be Bob Dylan”!), and the result is a unique body of work that rarely gets the respect it deserves. “Round Here” announced that as a mission statement from the very first notes of the band’s very first album.