Hard Candy Update

Amazon finally has fixed their audiostream for early purchasers of the Counting Crows Hard Candy cd, which I referred to a few days ago. I've been listening to it most of the day, and like what they've done (although I'm partial to the bootlegs of Richard Manuel/If I Could Give All My Love). American Girls is just an excellent song, and so is Miami.

I also like Adam's latest journal entry (reproduced below because there are no permalinks):

Oh yeah. I like coke. Well, not really coke. It's too sweet, but I am completely addicted to diet coke. So the commercial seemed and still seems perfectly harmless to me. I'm truly sorry if it upset some of you but that's the breaks. Sometimes I think people are too quick to make use of this term "selling out" without really thinking about what that actually means. As long as we make music the same way we always have and as long as business concerns never affect the way we make our art, then I think you are truly rude to accuse us of selling out just because we made a commercial for a product we actually like whose owners like counting crows enough to want us to represent them when they could probably have chosen people far more popular than we are.

This is a business we are in. Make no mistake about that. I don't happen to think that is a dirty word unless you do dirty business. Business is what adults do. Kids lives are all about free time and escaping from work, but adult lives are all about work and accomplishment and part of what I am trying to accomplish is to run the business of Counting Crows the best way I know how to run it without ever tainting the artistic side of what we do. And as long as I satisfy myself that I am doing just that, I know I never have to worry about selling out. It seems like every time we make a record, I have to read these feverish posts worried that this time we have finally given in and sold out to the terrible corporate monster. Are you so jaded? We've lasted ten years without doing it when 90% of the bands we started with are gone. Why would we think we need to start now? The records will always be there for you. We will always care enough to make the kind of records that brought you here and kept you here.

Trust me in that at least. We do it that way anyways because that's what we care about ourselves. That's why we're here in the first place. Because we care enough to want to do this. I'm glad we matter enough to you to upset you at all, but I just wanted to say I don't think you have to worry. I love this record and I love "American Girls" and I hope it's huge and I hope I don't freak out again and if you don't like this song or this record, then there will always be another one in a few years and hopefully that will be one you love again. But there will be another one cause with all the shitty music and all the shitty radio and tv and all the incredible cynicism, WE ARE STILL HERE and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Adam Duritz, Lecturer for Capitalism. I love it! Especially that line, "Business is what adults do." Made me laugh out loud!

[Posted at 16:08 CST on 06/05/02] [Link]