With famed alternative rock outfit Counting Crows set to perform at this year’s A&O Ball this Thursday, One-Click Wonders wanted to analyze the group in the week leading up to the big show, exploring various facets of the band. In the NU community, Counting Crows hold a very odd place in our collective hearts, being both one of the top ten musical acts on this campus according to Facebook and the folks behind a Wildcat marching band staple, “Accidentally in Love.” Today, we kick off our series with a mini-essay on Counting Crow’s place in music history.

Counting Crows never figured timing out. Though the alternative-rock group has seen considerable success over the years, the Berkely, Calif. band had plentiful opportunities to be an important band, but always seemed slightly out of step with the times, making them one of the bigger “what-if” bands of the 1990s. Adam Duritz and crew’s breakthrough single “Mr. Jones” came out amidst America’s grunge obsession, a year or two off from the alternative-boom helmed by bands like The Cranberries and The Wallflowers, Counting Crows becoming more of a precursor than a leader in a musical scene they fit so perfectly into. The band often lingered far too long between album releases, making them less relevant in the ever-shifting sonic scene of the 90s. The group’s 2002 effort Hard Candy lacked a killer single to truly sell the album, a problem that could have been fixed had they written 2004’s hit “Accidentally in Love” before Shrek 2. Even their latest release, the long-awaited Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, came out too closely to another huge come-back album, R.E.M.’s , and became overshadowed.

The close release dates between Counting Crows and R.E.M. also forces the inescapable question of style in Duritz’s band, and reveals why the group isn’t embraced by many musical circles. Counting Crows have always sounded llike an R.E.M.-rip off, constantly trying to replicate the jangly-guitars and lyrical delivery of Michael Stipe and co. To their credit, Duritz crams his song with more weighty words than Stipe ever did outside of “It’s the End of the World,” trying to emulate the storytelling-style of Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen, but just sounding like a sad man with a thesaurus and a few decent hooks. Not all bands have to be visionaries to be good, but they do need some traces of originality, and most of Counting Crow’s song catalog sounds like a stab at creating the next “Losing My Religion.” Counting Crows did pioneer one common-practice rampant in music today – they were one of the first bands to try to sound “indie” (a scene R.E.M. helped carve out a decade before) without actually being remotely independent.

So Counting Crows aren’t considered musical revolutionaries, nor are they considered very good, but sales speak, and people love Counting Crows. Though they never hit at just the right moment to establish themselves as the heads of any musical movement, the group has outlasted a plethora of other bands while maintaining great sales figures. Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings peaked at #3 on the Billboard Top 200 this year. Very few bands command such a lucrative and long-spanning career, especially a band constantly inches away from really hitting payday. What about the Crows makes them so loved?

The obvious answer is the group’s singles. Fault them for sounding too much like their influences and having god-awful lyrics, but Counting Crows know how to produce a catchy single that captures the public’s ear. “Mr. Jones” towers above everything else they have ever created, but songs like “Round Here,” “A Long December,” “Angels of the Silences,” “Hanginaround,” “Colorblind” and “Big Yellow Taxi” also charted and stuck with American music fans. Even “Accidentally in Love” continues to get playing time. Durwitz and his bandmates may not be original, but they figured out how to make up-tempo tracks with great choruses, choruses far superior to other alternative bands at the time. Very few bands have a collection of hits like Counting Crows, and people love these songs for their catchy sounds and “emotional” lyrics.

Counting Crow’s career-long biting of R.E.M. explains the other reason they have had such a lasting and fruitful career. They are a perpetual “college” band, meaning young adults love them and identify with what they sing about. As mentioned earlier, Counting Crows try to sound “different” than other bands, and though they have massive sales, they still aren’t as well-known as many bands out there. They inhabit the same world as groups like Gomez, O.A.R. and, to some extent, Jack Johnson – musical acts not universally known, making them (sorta) eclectic and thus attractive to college kids who crave to be “different” with the added benefit of “deep” lyrics. Most Counting Crow’s songs could be summarized “I’m depressed about girls, sigh,” but Duritz chooses to cover that simple sentence in plenty of long words and forced metaphors. But college kids love that, emotions being expressed in “creative” (read: complicated) ways. Counting Crows have an excellent market to tap into, and have been doing so excellently since 1993.

Yes, Counting Crows imitate far better bands and have never really given the world anything of long-lasting artistic quality, but it would be amiss to call them a complete disaster. Nothing they’ve released in the Oughts sounds special, but the group does have several older songs that sound pretty good. The band’s debut, August and Everything After, which I’ll discuss in more length tomorrow, remains Counting Crows’ best effort, featuring the highest concentration of songs both musically memorable and emotionally pained, even if Duritz’s words sound stiff as ever. “Colorblind” predicts the better moments in Sia’s career, drifting by on lovely piano strokes and Duritz’s surprisingly good ghostly vocals. The group’s greatest output is “A Long December,” a downtrodden dirge complete with funeral-worthy accordion and one of the best choruses the group ever penned. Nothing that should be saved in a time capsule, but far prettier than most 90’s alternative rock hits.

Counting Crows could be so much bigger. They have the hits, they just lacked the timing that would have turned them into a band spearheading the alternative scene and instead are a pretty memorable 90s band doomed to share the same CD-space as Hootie and the Blowfish on compilations to come. They aren’t close to being an important or essential band, but they are one of the most noteworthy bands of the 1990s, an excellent Trivial Pursuit answer. But they had a chance to be more than a passing reference to a decade, to be one of the musical faces of those ten years, but just seemed a bit off. That’s ultimately Counting Crows’ legacy – never enough to mean anything memorable, always tied to something else.