Song of the Day 12/29: Counting Crows, “A Long December”
It has been a long December, but I don’t think anybody believes this coming year will be better than the last. Adam Duritz doesn’t sound like he believes it when he sings it, either, but he wrote the song for a friend who was recuperating after getting hit by a car – hence the smell of hospitals in winter – so he was trying, uncharacteristically, to look on the bright side.
The song appeared on “Recovering the Satellites,” the band’s 1996 follow-up to their smash debut LP. Because it wasn’t released as a physical single it was ineligible for Billboard’s Hot 100, but it did reach the Top 10 in five of the publication’s airplay-based charts. It made No. 1 in Canada, where they know something about long Decembers.
The video features “Friends” actress Courteney Cox, who might have set a record for years between music video appearances. Twelve years earlier, director Brian DePalma picked Cox out of a casting call and featured her in Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” video, as the girl he pulls out of the crowd and onto the stage.
Duritz had a thing for dating actresses, and he briefly dated Cox the next year. Here’s how the future star of “Cougar Town” debuted, in that Springsteen video from 1984. She turns up at the 3:20 mark.
