Songoftheday 8/22/20 - The smell of hospitals in winter, and the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters but no pearls...

 

 

"A Long December" - Counting Crows

from the album Recovering The Satellites (1996)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: ineligible to chart

Billboard Hot 100 Airplay peak: #6 (one week)

Weeks in the Airplay Top-40: 24

 

Today's song of the day comes from the alternative rock band Counting Crows, whose lead radio promo from their second album Recovering The Satellites, "Angel Of The Silences", wasn't released as a commercial single, and just missed the top-40 on the airplay component of the Billboard Hot 100 in the fall of 1996. For the second song hyped to radio, the band also didn't release a single, for at the time it was the common thought that doing so would goose up the sales of the album (which IMHO was a bad gamble and ended up turning a lot of people off of buying music and eventually ushering in the Napster era). "A Long December", written by the band's Adam Duritz, David Bryson, Charlie Gillingham, Matt Malley, Ben Mize, and Dan Vickrey, was an introspective song about loss in love and the isolation looking back at the end of the year...

 Since "A Long December" wasn't available in stores as a single, it was kept from Billboard magazine's official Hot 100 pop chart. However, the song got so much radio love that it became the band's second song to make the top ten of the airplay component of the tally (after "Mr. Jones") in February of 1997. The song was well received at rock radio, reaching the top ten on both the Alternative (#5) and Mainstream (#9) Rock radio charts. It also crossed over to their Adult Top-40 format list at #6, spending half a year (26 weeks) on the chart. Internationally, the single went to #1 in Canada, and was a minor hit in the UK at #62. A third track from the album promoted to radio but not released as a single, the jangle-rock nugget "Daylight Fading", got to #51 on the Hot 100 Airplay chart, while being a moderate rock radio hit at #24 on Mainstream stations, and #26 on Alternative Rock radio, and peaked at #20 on the Adult Top-40 list. 

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Here's the band performing the song on Letterman promoting the album in 1997...

 

Next up, the band live in concert at Woodstock 99...

 

Lastly, on the Howard Stern Show in 2002...

 

Up tomorrow: Before Fallon, this groundbreaking hip-hop group describe plural verbs.