239. Song No. 3,572: “Four Days,” Counting Crows
This Desert Life, 1999

There have been so many unexpected delights in undertaking this project, but getting back in touch with how much I love the Counting Crows is truly one of those gifts that keep on giving. And I think it’s an enjoyment amplified by how getting older means less energy fueling fewer fucks about whatever imaginary audience is judging my so-called guilty pleasures, but still having plenty of imaginative drive to assume those joyless, faceless fucks just don’t know how to love some silly little piece of music so much that it’s a guaranteed way to make your heart sing, even for just a song’s play time. (But that’s what shamelessly deploying a good infinite-repeat run is for, so…)

I started losing track of this band not too long after this album’s release and I still don’t really know much about their post-millennium discography (plus, I always forget that I own Hard Candy, which feels like an entirely different band to me in the most neutral way possible), but their contributions to ’90s music are songs we should all be more grateful to exist in the same time as. Like, This Desert Life isn’t even my favorite of their records, but I keep forgetting to restart “Four Days” as I’m writing about it because the two songs that follow are so easy to get into that I forget I’m trying to capture one song’s importance to me and just happily, unthinkingly go wherever the album leads me instead. It lacks the life-raft melancholy of the preceding two studio albums and one live album that made me feel seen and understood and a little less like the emotional equivalent of perpetually flailing arms and desperately sought footing and doesn’t feel as cohesive as those records that came before it, but it also feels like stepping into the sunlight in a way that none of its predecessors do, either.

What the quartet does share, though, and it’s a probably a purely internal imposition asserting itself, is sounding like atmospheric conditions to me: the rainy afternoon that is August and Everything After; the drearier and more actively dodged city rain that the live collection Across a Wire (aptly subtitled Live in New York City, but also an in-rotation staple during that eons-ago high-school semester I took classes at Philly’s University of the Arts) sound like; the undeniable winter of Recovering the Satellites, far and away my favorite of the lot despite invoking just the worst fucking season; the relief of spring that permeates This Desert Life. I couldn’t give 75% of these a quantifiable guess (I listed to their sophomore album a LOT during the winter of my sophomore year) but those visceral time and temperature and tangibility associations they all ride in on is a richness that infuses the music with the weight of the world beyond them, making them feel so much bigger and more immediate and more lived-in than so many other albums.

I honestly can’t recall if “Four Days” is a song that ever grabbed me as much as its instant-favorite littermates like “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” and “High Life” and especially “St. Robinson in His Cadillac Dream” but got lost to time. It’s certainly not a song that’s gotten much playtime this millennium—until it sounded immediately inviting and deeply familiar when it popped up in the 12,700 Songs playlist. It embodies the journey it goes on and the emotional resolve you need to make the lonely parts worth doing, though perhaps feeling more like preparing for a long car ride alone than an insurmountable distance only traversable by flight; nevertheless, undeniably relatable to anyone who’s had their heart broken time and again with those endless goodbyes that make physical separation the unkindest of tragedy on interminable repeat.

It’s not a song that sounds like loss, though, despite coming out the gate with “All I want is something good / It gets harder every time:” The lyrics sound like the bitterness of being swallowed by miles and states lines, sure, but the notes carrying them sound like speeding ahead to the next reunion, no matter what the future holds and the inevitable bumps in its road to getting there again.