Hanginaround

Counting Crows rose to fame quickly, with their 1993 debut album selling over 10 million copies worldwide. For their founders Adam Duritz and David Bryson, however, it was a longer road, as they each spent a lot of time in Northern California kicking around with different bands before Counting Crows. In our interview with Adam Duritz, he says that is what inspired the song: "We spent 10 years in clubs, so I spent a lot of years hanging around Berkeley, not necessarily sure whether I was going anywhere, but having a lot of fun. Being up late, getting drunk, and playing music. I spent a lot of years not really knowing where that was going."

This Desert Life was the group's third album, and it found them in an experimental mood. "We were trying to be creative with how things sound, and 'Hanginaround' was just the first one we worked on," Adam Duritz said. "I had this idea for a very simple three or four chord pattern that would go around over a Hip-Hop beat, and then all of a sudden exploding into a harmony of choruses. It just seemed like a really fun drum-loopy thing to do."

The band used a lot of tape loops on this song for the piano parts, but it doesn't sound that way. Duritz says that there are eight different piano pieced layered together on the song, some that he played, and others played by their keyboard player Charlie Gillingham.