I still don’t know exactly what “A Long December” by Counting Crows was meant to evoke in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, but I can tell you what it did for me: instantly took me back to that window of time in the early-to-mid 1990s when I was working in Atlanta. Spending a lot of time driving around and listening to the radio station 99X, which seemed to have every one of their songs on frequent rotation.
Supposedly, 99X was the home of “alternative rock,” but I suspect they said that mostly to let people like me believe we weren’t listening to mainstream radio.
I guess technically, it was accurate, since “mainstream” hits at the time were dominated by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. But it didn’t feel very alternative to be listening to Counting Crows, or Hootie and the Blowfish, or The Dave Matthews Band, all of which would become Starbucks and Borders Books mainstays.
Don’t get me wrong; I got all of these albums on CD, and I listened to them incessantly. There was a period when I had all of August and Everything After and Cracked Rear View memorized, and I continued listening to Under the Table and Dreaming well into my move to California. I’m not saying they’re bad, just that they’re not edgy in the slightest.
“A Long December” came out in 1996, which was the end of that period for me. The beginning was around 1993, when there was another song that got played constantly: “Shine” by Collective Soul. Collective Soul didn’t stick with me as much as the others (although I still like “December” from their later self-titled album), but this song is quantum-linked in my memory with the Counting Crows.
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