I have a somewhat unique relationship to the song “Omaha” from this album. I was a college baseball player (for those that don’t know, university sports are huge in the US, and baseball, while a much smaller audience than American football, is still a fairly well-liked college sport). The yearly baseball championship, known as the College World Series, is played in a city called Omaha, Nebraska. So Omaha is kind of a mantra for college baseball players, the vision of success that you’d remind yourself of every day. My team printed “Omaha” all over our gear in little places as a reminder - getting to Omaha was the goal. So of course they played the song “Omaha” at every baseball stadium we visited, during pregame warmups or between innings; everywhere you went, it was on. When I hear it, I smell fresh-cut grass and get a mini stress-daydream that the game’s about to start and I’m not ready yet, plus I forgot how to throw a curveball since I haven’t played in 13 years. Good times.

The rest of this album is kind of a yin-yang situation for me. “Mr. Jones” might be the perfect pop-alt song, too flawless to even describe at this point in its lifecycle after 30 years of radio overplay. But the rest of the album is down, man. I don’t know what’s going wrong with the protagonist in these songs, but damn, life is not going his way at all. I’d never realized how much Radiohead is in Counting Crows’ sound, but it sounds like the gloomy weather I imagine fills every day in Radiohead’s Oxfordshire migrated over to California while Counting Crows were writing these songs.

Jams

“Around Here”
“Omaha”
“Mr. Jones”

From the roundup Jamwise #44 - The Best Albums of 1993, pt. 3.