We’ll get back to that October series soon (been a weird week—more on that from Stu later this afternoon), but Bomani Jones, the ESPN guy, pointed out on Twitter today that Recovering the Satellites (Spotify link here) was released 25 years ago today, and it seemed like a thing to post about, given our unabashed devotion to Counting Crows here, and to Adam Duritz more specifically.
25 years.
25 years since this album.
The album, to provide a little context, was the one that followed August and Everything After. It was the sophomore album to a hard-to-follow debut, and it came in the backdrop of Kurt Cobain’s death, a death that was personal in a variety of ways for Duritz (interview link here). It’s an album, in large part, about picking up the pieces after colliding head-on with fame (there’s a similarity here to Maggie Rogers’s “Light On,” which we talked about peripherally in a Sunday Essay once). About recovering them. About recovering those satellites.
Of the first four albums, the pre-Shrek albums, Recovering the Satellites is probably the quietest in terms of its notoriety, in both the present and the past. August and Everything After was on another plane. This Desert Life embodied that western desert rock facet of the band that’s such an original and comfortable position for them to occupy. Hard Candy hit the right notes all the way through. Recovering the Satellites…it’s darker, perhaps not in subject matter, but in terms of its encounter with the gloom. It gives us the reeling of Catapult. It gives us the rage of Angels of the Silences. It gives us Goodnight Elisabeth, and the title track, and that funny Ben Folds reference on Monkey. It gives us A Long December, and the hope that accompanies that song. A durable hope. A bruised hope. A hope from amidst the brokenness.
I’ve long been grateful for Duritz’s work, and when these anniversaries come up, that gratitude grabs hold of me rather loudly. I choked up a few times seeing them in Austin last month, lying back on the lawn swimming in all sorts of thoughts when he talked about how they’d been doing this for thirty years now. Three decades. 25 years since Recovering the Satellites. 25 years since they poked their head up after that head-on collision with fame, a collision that broke the already-broken guy into all those pieces, all those little satellites. 25 years since they put the music out again, broken and all. 25 years. And thirty now, more than I’ve had years on earth, of handing out that comfort through the music and the poetry. Three decades.
Good morning.
