Claude says:Counting Crows recorded their second album the same way they made August and Everything After — renting a big house with Gil Norton and working the room acoustics for natural resonance. It hit number one in the US three years after the debut, with "A Long December" becoming their biggest single, though Adam Duritz famously cut two piano-and-horns tracks he couldn't figure out how to sequence. A few scattered plays over fifteen years didn't add up to much, but when you finally sat down with it in 2021, "A Long December" and "Angels of the Silences" pulled you in for real.