‘Hard Candy’

By Leigh E. Rich

Counting Crows
Hard Candy
Geffen
A

Similar to the alcoholic who’s hit rock bottom, the musical perfection the Counting Crows achieved with their debut album, August and Everything After, in 1993 left them few places to go.

While 1996 and 1999 releases Recovering the Satellites and This Desert Life garnered some critical success, wordsmith Adam Duritz and the boys have endured the bittersweet road of first-time flawlessness to climb back on the wagon with 2002’s Hard Candy.

More melodious but less buoyant than their first album, Hard Candy is Counting Crows almost at their best—though not likely to completely replace August in the hearts of “hard-Crow” fans.

Reminiscent of August’s “Mr. Jones,” Candy’s “American Girls” has secured both airtime and a national Coca Cola television spot, but this is as cotton candy as the album gets.

The redolent title track about summers gone by, the temperamentally evocative love song “Goodnight L.A.,” the desolate fragility of “Black and Blue,” and the joyful melancholy of a drunkard in “Holiday in Spain”—combined with guest background vocalists Sheryl Crow, Matthew Sweet, and Ryan Adams—make Hard Candy the tasty, obdurate treat sure to stick in the throats of Crows fans for at least another decade. 

Rich, L. E. (2002, August 21). Counting Crows: ‘Hard Candy.’ CU-Denver Advocate.