For about six months in late 1993 and early 1994, Counting Crows were the fastest selling debut act on Geffen Records since Nirvana, and the band's drummer hated their biggest song so much he refused to play it properly. Steve Bowman thought "Mr. Jones" sounded like country music, would not be talked round, and so producer T Bone Burnett quietly hired a session drummer called Denny Fongheiser to come in and nail it in two takes. Bowman stayed in the band long enough to do the touring, then was fired before the second album. The single he had refused to commit to went on to become the most-played song on American radio in the spring of 1994.
That story is the shape of August and Everything After in miniature. The record arrived on 14 September 1993, the same day Geffen sister label DGC released Nirvana's In Utero, and it was an obvious commercial outlier: an acoustic, accordion-flecked, Van Morrison-haunted song cycle by a Berkeley bar band fronted by a UC Berkeley English-literature dropout, dropped into the height of the grunge era. Within six months it had sold a million copies. Within a year Counting Crows were Grammy-nominated for Best New Artist, and within two years it was certified seven times platinum in the United States and Adam Duritz was having a nervous breakdown on the cover of Rolling Stone. This is how the album got made, who it lifted up, and what it cost the people who made it.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Counting Crows |
| Album | August and Everything After |
| Release date | 14 September 1993 |
| Label | DGC Records (Geffen) |
| Producer | T Bone Burnett |
| Executive producer | Gary Gersh |
| Studios | Counting Crows' home studio, Kiva West, Conway Recording Studios, Village Recorders, Sunset Sound Recorders (Los Angeles) |
| Recorded | February to June 1993 |
| Genre | Alternative rock, roots rock, folk rock |
| Track count | 11 |
| Total runtime | 51:42 |
| Billboard 200 peak | 4 |
| UK Albums Chart peak | 16 |
| Other notable peaks | Canada (RPM) 1, Australia 12, Spain 8, Portugal 10 |
| Certifications | RIAA 7x Platinum, Music Canada 7x Platinum, BPI Platinum, ARIA Platinum, RMNZ Platinum |
| Estimated worldwide sales | Approximately 10 million copies |
| Singles | Mr. Jones, Round Here, Rain King, A Murder of One |
The Bay Area Years
Counting Crows did not start as a band. They started as Adam Duritz and David Bryson playing two-man acoustic sets in San Francisco and Berkeley coffee houses in 1991. Duritz had washed out of UC Berkeley a few credits short of an English-literature degree and was, by his own description, washing dishes by day so he could play music at night. He had been the singer of a noisier Bay Area outfit called the Himalayans, alongside bassist Marty Jones, guitarist Dave Janusko, drummer Chris Roldan and David Serva's son on the periphery. Several of the songs that would later anchor August and Everything After began life there: "Round Here" was written with the Himalayans in 1989, and "Anna Begins" carries Himalayans co-writing credits to this day.
Bryson, an older, more methodical figure who already owned a small home studio, was the producer-guitarist who pulled the songs out of Duritz and helped him finish them. Friends drifted in and out of the duo: keyboardist Charlie Gillingham, bassist Matt Malley and drummer Steve Bowman became the working five-piece by 1992. Multi-instrumentalist David Immerglueck, whom Duritz had known for years, also played on the demos but turned down full membership because he was already committed to Camper Van Beethoven and Monks of Doom; he would not formally join Counting Crows until 1999.
The band's local reputation was built on Duritz's voice and presence. He was an unusually verbose, openly literary lyricist for the post-grunge moment: "A Murder of One" took its title from the British nursery rhyme about magpies and gave the band their name; "Rain King" was lifted, in part, from Saul Bellow's 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King. None of this was supposed to translate into a major label bidding war. It did anyway.
The Bidding War and the Geffen Deal
Geffen Records A&R man Gary Gersh, the executive who had signed Nirvana to DGC two years earlier, heard a Counting Crows demo tape in early 1992 and was, in the band's own retelling, "blown away". By February 1992 nine record labels were chasing the band. In April 1992 Counting Crows signed with Gersh at Geffen on a deal so generous that, as The Washington Post noted, industry insiders started calling them Accounting Crows.
"That first album went on to become a seven-times-platinum success in the U.S. alone, at the time the fastest-selling record since Nirvana's Nevermind."
Chicago Sun-Times, 7 September 2018
The label deal had two immediate consequences for the record. The first was money: Geffen could afford to put the band into multiple Los Angeles studios with a top-tier producer. The second was profile. On 16 January 1993, before the album existed in finished form, Counting Crows were asked to fill in for an absent Van Morrison at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, introduced by Robbie Robertson and singing Morrison's "Caravan" in front of a live broadcast audience that included most of the music industry. They were, in industry terms, a known quantity before they had released a single note.
Pre-Production and the Flying Demos
Before they signed to DGC, the band recorded a long series of demos that fans now know as the Flying Demos. The reel included early versions of "Mr. Jones", "Round Here", "Rain King", "Omaha", "Anna Begins" and "Einstein on the Beach (For an Eggman)", along with songs that never made the record:
- "Margery Dreams of Horses", which Duritz has described as the first song he ever wrote for Counting Crows.
- "Shallow Days", which would resurface as a bonus track on the 2007 deluxe edition.
- "Love and Addiction", a Himalayans-era co-write with Marty Jones, Toby Hawkins and Lydia Holly.
- "40 Years", "Bulldog", "Lightning" and "We're Only Love", which never made it to a finished album.
- "Einstein on the Beach (For an Eggman)", later released as a non-album single B-side.
The Flying Demos are the reason most of August and Everything After sounds the way it does. By the time T Bone Burnett walked into the room, the songs had already been arranged, road-tested in clubs and recorded in Bryson's home setup. What remained was finding the sound.
T Bone Burnett and the Recording Sessions
T Bone Burnett was an unfashionable choice for a 1993 alternative-rock debut. He had played guitar in Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, made his name producing Los Lobos and Elvis Costello, and would not become a household name in roots production until O Brother, Where Art Thou? seven years later. Hiring him on a band signed during the year of In Utero was an unambiguous commercial signal: Geffen was not pitching Counting Crows as a grunge band.
Sessions ran from February to June 1993 across five Los Angeles studios: the band's own home studio, Kiva West Recording Studios, Conway Recording Studios, Village Recorders and Sunset Sound Recorders. Burnett's approach drew on the live-room, minimal-overdub philosophy he had developed with Costello and Los Lobos. A house in the Hollywood Hills was used at certain points for the natural reverb, and Burnett encouraged the band to track together rather than in isolation booths. Stephen Marcussen mastered the album at Precision Mastering in Los Angeles.
"Well before T-Bone Burnett became one of the hottest producers on the face of the Earth, he was hard at work sculpting the debut album of one of the biggest non-grunge buzz bands of the early '90s, the Counting Crows."
Will Levith, Diffuser.fm, 14 September 2013
The sessions were not smooth. Duritz, then in his late twenties and a perfectionist about his own voice, has said in subsequent interviews that he "must have sung the song 100 times" before getting a vocal he could live with on "Mr. Jones", and that "Rain King" cost him a similar number of takes. But the most-cited friction is the Steve Bowman story. Bowman, the band's drummer, hated "Mr. Jones". He felt it was country, not rock, and that it was not the kind of music he had signed up to play. According to Duritz, "thinking that way, he played it that way and ruined it over and over again." Burnett's response was to bring in Denny Fongheiser, an experienced LA session player, to cut "Mr. Jones" in two takes. Fongheiser is the drummer on the album version of the song that Counting Crows took to number five on US radio. He also plays percussion across the record. Bowman is the credited drummer on every other track.
Burnett himself plays guitar on several songs, alongside the band's own players. He brought in further session colour from outside the band: pedal-steel and mandolin from David Immerglueck, second guitar and "guitorgan" from Bill Dillon, and a pool of harmony vocalists drawn largely from the Jayhawks, including Gary Louris and Mark Olson, plus Maria McKee, formerly of Lone Justice. The notional sonic palette of the record (acoustic guitars, accordion, B3 organ, mandolin, mandocello, harmonica, pedal steel) is a long way from anything else in the Geffen catalogue of 1993, and that was the point.
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Counting Crows | ||
| Lead vocals, piano, harmonica | Adam Duritz | Principal songwriter |
| Guitars, vocals | David Bryson | Producer-guitarist; co-wrote majority of album |
| Piano, Hammond B3, accordion, Chamberlin, vocals | Charlie Gillingham | Joined band in 1991 |
| Bass, guitar, vocals | Matt Malley | Left band in 2005 |
| Drums, vocals | Steve Bowman | Plays on every track except "Mr. Jones"; fired in late 1994 |
| Guest and session musicians | ||
| Drums on "Mr. Jones", percussion | Denny Fongheiser | Brought in by Burnett after Bowman struggled with the country feel |
| Guitars, mandolin, pedal steel, mandocello, vocals | David Immerglueck | Long-time band associate; full member from 1999 |
| Guitar, guitorgan | Bill Dillon | Adds the rhythmic, electric-organ-like texture across several tracks |
| Backing vocals | Gary Louris | The Jayhawks |
| Backing vocals | Mark Olson | The Jayhawks |
| Backing vocals | Maria McKee | Formerly of Lone Justice |
| Additional guitar, producer | T Bone Burnett | Plays as well as produces |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer | T Bone Burnett | |
| Executive producer | Gary Gersh | Geffen A&R; signed the band |
| Mastering | Stephen Marcussen | Precision Mastering, Los Angeles |
| 2007 deluxe edition mastering | Adam Ayan | Gateway Mastering, Portland, Maine |
| Mixing on "Mr. Jones" | Scott Litt and Patrick McCarthy | Litt was R.E.M.'s long-time producer |
| Artwork | ||
| Sleeve design | Larry Vigon | Cover features handwritten lyrics to the unreleased title track |
The Songs
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Round Here | Duritz, Janusko, Jewett, Roldan, Bryson | 5:32 | Yes | Originated with the Himalayans in 1989 |
| 2 | Omaha | Duritz | 3:40 | Story-song; one of the oldest album tracks | |
| 3 | Mr. Jones | Duritz, Bryson | 4:33 | Yes | Drums by Denny Fongheiser; mixed by Scott Litt |
| 4 | Perfect Blue Buildings | Duritz | 5:01 | Surrealist lyric; widely covered live | |
| 5 | Anna Begins | Duritz, Bryson, Jones, Hawkins, Holly | 4:32 | Himalayans-era co-write | |
| 6 | Time and Time Again | Duritz, Bryson, Gillingham, Bowman, Dixon | 5:13 | Don Dixon credit reflects an earlier R.E.M.-adjacent producer pass | |
| 7 | Rain King | Duritz, Bryson | 4:16 | Yes | Title borrowed from Saul Bellow's novel Henderson the Rain King |
| 8 | Sullivan Street | Duritz, Bryson | 4:29 | Named after a street in Manhattan's West Village | |
| 9 | Ghost Train | Duritz | 4:01 | Charlie Gillingham's accordion is the lead instrument | |
| 10 | Raining in Baltimore | Duritz | 4:41 | Solo Duritz piano ballad; later a B-side to "Mr. Jones" | |
| 11 | A Murder of One | Duritz, Bryson, Malley | 5:44 | Yes | Source of the band's name; built around the magpie nursery rhyme |
"Round Here" opens the record on a slow 6/8 sway, Duritz half-talking the first verse before the band lifts the song into its now-familiar yearning chorus. He has explained the song repeatedly in interviews and on stage: it is about a man walking out of a house and out of his own life at the same time, and the chorus is the parental nonsense (we always stand up straight, we carve out our names) that does not protect anyone from anything. Duritz has also tied it to the moment of leaving university and watching friends take "boring jobs" while the band kept washing dishes and digging holes to fund the dream. The song was originally a Himalayans piece: when Counting Crows recorded it for August they slowed it, stripped the electric attack and gave it the loping, accordion-shaded feel that became the band's signature.
"Omaha" is the closest thing on the record to a pop song that an alt-rock-radio programmer could place between Pearl Jam and Soul Asylum without comment, and the album's third single in some markets. "Mr. Jones" sits next to it and dominates the run. The song is a private joke that escaped: Duritz wrote it after a night out with the Himalayans' Marty Jones, watching Marty's father David Serva play flamenco guitar in San Francisco and ending up at a bar called the New Amsterdam in North Beach, where they spotted Chris Isaak's longtime drummer Kenney Dale Johnson sitting with three women. "It just seemed like, you know, we couldn't even manage to talk to girls," Duritz told HuffPost in 2013, "we were just thinking if we were rock stars, it'd be easier. I went home and wrote the song." The "I want to be Bob Dylan" line is doing more than just the obvious work; some critics also hear it as a doff of the cap to Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man", another song addressed to a Mr. Jones.
"I wrote a song about me, I just happened to be out with him that night."
Adam Duritz on "Mr. Jones", HuffPost, 6 June 2013
"Perfect Blue Buildings" and "Anna Begins" are the album's emotional spine: a surrealist drift through insomnia and self-loathing, then a four-minute argument between two people who cannot bring themselves to admit they have fallen in love. "Time and Time Again" carries an old co-writing credit to producer Don Dixon, suggesting an earlier abandoned production attempt. "Rain King" is the joyful one. "Sullivan Street" is named after a real West Village address. "Ghost Train" rides on Charlie Gillingham's accordion and a hand-percussion shuffle. "Raining in Baltimore", a solo Duritz piano ballad, is so spare it would later become a B-side to "Mr. Jones" without being reworked. "A Murder of One" closes the album with the band's own origin myth: the magpie counting rhyme that gives the band its name, set against a building, almost gospel arrangement.
The Album Cover and the Missing Title Track
The most distinctive thing about August and Everything After, before a single note plays, is the cover. Designed by Larry Vigon, it is a yellow background carrying nothing but a block of handwritten lyrics. The handwriting is Duritz's. The lyric is the title song. The title song is not on the album.
"August and Everything After" the song was cut during sequencing. The band has never given a fully consistent reason: Duritz at various points has said it did not fit, and at others that it was too personal. They left the lyric on the cover as a kind of dare and moved on. A live version surfaced on the band's 2011 Live at Town Hall album, drawn from a 2007 New York show in which they played the album in order plus the missing title cut. The song was finally released officially on 24 January 2019, as an Amazon Original, in a recording with the London Symphony Orchestra at AIR Studios in London. By that point fans had been waiting for it for twenty-five years.
Release and Reception
DGC released August and Everything After on 14 September 1993, sharing the day with Nirvana's In Utero. It was a dramatic split in label personality: a stripped-down folk-rock record from a coffeehouse band on one side, Steve Albini-engineered noise from the biggest band in the world on the other, both shipped by the same major-label conglomerate. Initial reviews of August were mixed and louder than they should have been. Rolling Stone's Thom Jurek gave it four stars. NME gave it 6/10, and Stuart Bailie liked the songs more than the singer. The Village Voice's Robert Christgau gave it a B-minus. Entertainment Weekly's David Browne, more famously, gave it a D.
"Surely it isn't a crime to recycle rock licks; if it were, Keith Richards would be doing hard time."
David Browne, Entertainment Weekly, February 1994 (the review that gave the album a D)
Browne accused Duritz of trying to "steal the Van out of Van Morrison" and listed R.E.M., 10,000 Maniacs, U2, Dion, the Band and Dylan as transparent reference points. Retrospective reviews have largely sided with the public against him: AllMusic's Mike DeGagne later gave the album four stars, the Encyclopedia of Popular Music awarded it a full five, and in October 2019 Rolling Stone placed it at number 67 on the magazine's "100 Best Albums of the '90s" list. Sales told their own story long before the critics caught up. The album reached number four on the Billboard 200, number one on the Canadian RPM albums chart, number sixteen in the United Kingdom, and number twelve in Australia. By February 2002 it had sold over six million copies in the United States; the RIAA has since certified it seven times platinum, and worldwide sales are reported at around ten million.
The Singles and Music Videos
| Single | Released | Director | US Radio Songs peak | Other notable peaks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mr. Jones | 1 December 1993 | Charles Wittenmeier | 5 | Canada (RPM) 1, France 7, Australia 13, UK 28 |
| Round Here | 23 May 1994 | Mark Neale | 31 | US Modern Rock 7, Canada 6, Iceland 12 |
| Rain King | 3 October 1994 | Mark Pellington | Did not chart | Promo airplay only in most territories |
| A Murder of One | 1995 | Mark Romanek | Did not chart | Final single from the album |
"Mr. Jones" was released on 1 December 1993, with a mixed-by-Scott-Litt single edit and "Raining in Baltimore" as the B-side. The video, directed by Charles Wittenmeier and shot in lower Manhattan, was added to MTV rotation in late December 1993 and exploded across early 1994. It won Best New Artist Video at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards and Best New Rock Artist Clip of the Year at the 1994 Billboard Music Video Awards. The single peaked at number five on the US Billboard Radio Songs chart, hit number one in Canada, and reached number seven in France. The remastered HD version of the video, posted to the band's official YouTube channel in 2009, has accumulated more than 358 million views.
"Round Here" followed in May 1994 with a Mark Neale-directed clip in which buildings collapse, Duritz walks alone along railroad tracks, and a woman carries a sign reading "Nobody Move and Nobody Gets Hurt" through Los Angeles. The single did not chart on the Billboard Hot 100 because of the chart's at-the-time policy of excluding airplay-only releases, but it reached number seven on Modern Rock Tracks, number eleven on Mainstream Rock and number six in Canada. "Rain King" went out as a promo-driven third single in October 1994. "A Murder of One" closed the album cycle in 1995. From 1994 onwards, the band's drummer Steve Bowman could be seen miming to a part on "Mr. Jones" that he had not played.
Touring and the Cost of Fame
Counting Crows toured August and Everything After across all of 1993 and 1994, both as a headliner and in support of artists who were a generation older or two genres away: the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Cracker, the Cranberries, Suede, Los Lobos, Jellyfish and Midnight Oil. The 15 January 1994 episode of Saturday Night Live was, in Duritz's later view, the night the audience for the band stopped being radio listeners and started being "everyone". A 1994 cover of Rolling Stone followed, with the now-famous headline "The Biggest New Band in America". Duritz's own response to that level of attention was, in his words, a nervous breakdown.
"We heard that, that [Cobain] had shot himself. And it really scared the hell out of me because I thought, these things in my life are getting so out of control."
Adam Duritz, quoted in The new Counting Crows FAQ, 4 July 1999
Cobain's suicide on 5 April 1994, in the middle of the run-up to "Mr. Jones" peaking on US radio, hit Duritz harder than is usually reported. The song he wrote in response, "Catapult", became the opening track of Recovering the Satellites two years later. The penultimate show of the August tour, on 9 December 1994 at the Élysée Montmartre in Paris, was recorded by Geffen and would be issued thirteen years later as the second disc of the album's deluxe reissue. Steve Bowman was fired from the band before the year ended; he was replaced on drums by Ben Mize.
Awards and Year-End Lists
The 1994/95 awards cycle treated August as a debut-of-the-year story, even when the actual debut had been released fifteen months earlier:
- Two 1995 Grammy nominations: Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for "Round Here", and Best New Artist for the band.
- 1995 American Music Award nominations for Favorite Pop/Rock Album, Favorite Pop/Rock New Artist, and Favorite Alternative Artist (which the band won).
- 1994 MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist Video for "Mr. Jones".
- 1994 Billboard Music Video Award for Best New Rock Artist Clip of the Year for "Mr. Jones".
- 1995 Juno Award nomination in Canada for Best Selling Album.
- Number 67 on Rolling Stone's 2019 "100 Best Albums of the '90s".
- Number 66 on the Billboard 200's decade-end albums chart for the 1990s.
Reissues and Anniversaries
On 18 September 2007, DGC issued a two-disc deluxe edition of August and Everything After for the album's fourteenth anniversary. Disc one carried the original 11-song running order remastered by Adam Ayan at Gateway Mastering in Portland, Maine, with six demos appended as bonus tracks: an acoustic "Shallow Days", "Mean Jumper Blues" (a Blind Lemon Jefferson cover), "Love and Addiction", an early "Omaha", another "Shallow Days" demo, and an acoustic take of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land". Disc two captured the 9 December 1994 Élysée Montmartre show in full, including extended live versions of "Round Here", "A Murder of One" and "Anna Begins", several of which run twice as long on stage as on record.
In September 2007, between the 2007 deluxe and the start of the band's Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings campaign, Counting Crows played all of August in album order at Town Hall in New York City and added the missing title track. That show was released as August and Everything After: Live at Town Hall in 2011, with audio mixed for both CD and DVD. In January 2019, the band finally issued a studio version of "August and Everything After" the song, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra at AIR Studios. In December 2025, HBO Max released the feature documentary Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately? under its Music Box series, focused on the band's rise after August and the making of Recovering the Satellites; it features Bryson, Gillingham, Vickrey, Immerglueck, Malley, Cyndi Lauper, Coldplay's Chris Martin, and Mary-Louise Parker among the interviewees.
Legacy and Influence
The simplest description of August and Everything After is that it survived. Most of the bands DGC was selling in late 1993 are either disbanded, reduced to legacy-act revivals or buried under the weight of a single hit. Counting Crows have released eight more studio albums (most recently Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets! in May 2025), retained all but one of their August-era members and continue to headline arenas and amphitheatres into the 2020s. They are, by Billboard's count, the eighth-greatest Adult Alternative artist of all time. As of late 2014 the band had sold more than twenty million albums; the seven million from August remain the bulk of that total.
"You might call them the Mumford & Sons or Lumineers of the '90s."
Will Levith, Diffuser.fm, 14 September 2013
The musical legacy is unmistakable in two directions. Going backwards, the album re-licensed Van Morrison, the Band, R.E.M. and 10,000 Maniacs for a younger audience that had not bought any of those records in the first place. Going forwards, it laid one of several pieces of foundation for the acoustic-band, festival-friendly American roots-rock revival of the late 2000s and 2010s: the Lumineers, Mumford & Sons, the Avett Brothers and (later) Noah Gundersen, who recorded a live cover of "Round Here" in 2024 and described it as the song that made him want to write music. "Round Here" alone has been covered or sampled live by Panic! at the Disco, Dustin Kensrue of Thrice, Kasey Chambers, David Ford and Marianas Trench's Josh Ramsay; the Gaslight Anthem's "High Lonesome" lifts a lyric from it directly.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The Mr. Jones drum chair | Steve Bowman did not play on "Mr. Jones". Session drummer Denny Fongheiser was brought in by T Bone Burnett and cut the track in two takes after Bowman insisted the song was country and refused to commit to it. |
| The missing title track | The song "August and Everything After" was cut during sequencing, but its handwritten lyrics still appear on the album cover designed by Larry Vigon. It was not released officially until 24 January 2019, with the London Symphony Orchestra at AIR Studios in London. |
| The Van Morrison sub | On 16 January 1993, before the album was finished, Counting Crows filled in for an absent Van Morrison at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, introduced by Robbie Robertson and singing Morrison's "Caravan". |
| The release-day twin | DGC released August and Everything After on 14 September 1993, the same day it released Nirvana's In Utero. The two albums shared an A&R man, Gary Gersh. |
| Accounting Crows | The Geffen deal struck in April 1992 was so lucrative that The Washington Post reported the band had been nicknamed "Accounting Crows" by industry insiders before they had released a record. |
| Mr. Jones the real person | The Mr. Jones of the song is Marty Jones, the bassist of Adam Duritz's earlier band the Himalayans. Duritz wrote it after a night out watching Marty's father David Serva play flamenco guitar in San Francisco. |
| The Jayhawks connection | Backing vocals on the album include Gary Louris and Mark Olson of the Jayhawks, plus Maria McKee, formerly of Lone Justice. |
| The David Immerglueck wait | Immerglueck plays guitar, mandolin, pedal steel and mandocello on the album, but turned down full membership in 1993 because he was already in Camper Van Beethoven and Monks of Doom. He finally joined Counting Crows in 1999. |
| The Don Dixon co-credit | "Time and Time Again" carries a co-writing credit to producer Don Dixon, a vestige of an earlier production attempt before Burnett came on board. |
| The "Generation Jones" assist | According to Duritz, the song "Mr. Jones" partly inspired Jonathan Pontell's coining of the term "Generation Jones" for the cohort born between 1954 and 1965. |
| The five-studio shuffle | The album was tracked across the band's home studio and four further LA facilities: Kiva West, Conway Recording Studios, Village Recorders and Sunset Sound Recorders. Burnett moved sessions deliberately to find the right room for each song. |
| The Élysée Montmartre tape | The penultimate show of the album's tour, played at the Élysée Montmartre in Paris on 9 December 1994, was recorded by Geffen and sat unreleased for thirteen years before becoming disc two of the 2007 deluxe edition. |
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