Mr. Jones

This song is a commentary on fame. With the line, "When everybody loves me, I will never be lonely," lead signer Adam Duritz is stating - with more than a touch of sarcasm - that fame will make everything better ("never be lonely" is repeated to drive home the message: This guy is delusional). When it became the first hit for the band, Duritz was suddenly recognized all over America, which he found discomfiting. The newfound notoriety sent him into a prolonged funk; suddenly he found himself singing a song about dreaming of fame when he was quite bitter about it. With the song resonating his troubles, he came to loath singing it. Duritz stopped writing for over a year, and the Counting Crows second album, Recovering the Satellites, wasn't released until three years after their debut. Looking back on the song in our 2013 interview with Adam Duritz, he explained that even though it is foolish to think that the adulation of fame will solve your problems, it's hard to resist. Said Duritz: "You're supposed to see through that guy: 'When everybody loves me, I'll never be lonely.' You're supposed to know that's not true. For one thing, there's no such thing as 'everybody loves me.' Nobody knows you in that case. So I knew that wasn't going to happen that way. But you still want it: you want life to be easier, you want to be a rock star so it's easier to talk to a girl. It's the same crazy person sitting there with the girl later, though. So it doesn't fix things."

"Mr. Jones" is Marty Jones, a friend of lead singer Adam Duritz. Before Duritz joined Counting Crows, they were in a band together called The Himalayans.

This was written by lead singer Adam Duritz and guitarist David Bryson (the other three band members also got composer credits). On an episode of VH1's Storytellers, Adam explained: "It's really a song about my friend Marty and I. We went out one night to watch his dad play, his dad was a Flamenco guitar player who lived in Spain (David Serva), and he was in San Francisco in the mission playing with his old Flamenco troupe. And after the gig we all went to this bar called the New Amsterdam in San Francisco on Columbus and we got completely drunk. And Marty and I sat at the bar staring at these two girls, wishing there was some way we could go talk to them, but we were too shy. We kept joking with each other that if we were big rock stars instead of such loser, low-budget musicians, this would be easy. I went home that night and I wrote a song about it. I joke about what it's about, that story. But it's really a song about all the dreams and all the things that make you want to go into doing whatever it is that seizes your heart, whether it's being a rock star or being a doctor or whatever. Those things run from 'all this stuff I have pent up inside of me' to 'I want to meet girls because I'm tired of not being able to.' It is a lot of those things, it's about all those dreams, but it's also kind of cautionary because it's about how misguided you may be about some of those things and how hollow they may be too. Like the character in the song keeps saying, 'When everybody loves me I will never be lonely,' and you're supposed to know that that's not the way it's gonna be. I knew that even then. And this is a song about my dreams." Duritz later revealed that the guy at the bar who was getting the girls was Kenney Dale Johnson, who was Chris Isaak's drummer.