August and Everything After by Counting Crows

August and Everything After, Counting Crows' debut album, came out on September 14, 1993, and it's a heart-on-sleeve folk rock record that aches in all the right places. T Bone Burnett produced it and added guitar, with the founding lineup of Adam Duritz on vocals, David Bryson on guitar, Charlie Gillingham on keyboards, Matt Malley on bass and Steve Bowman on drums. Multi-instrumentalist David Immerglück sat in on the sessions and would become a full member in 1999.

Duritz sings like a man with too much to say and not enough time, rambling, aching and building to a howl. "Round Here" unspools slowly into a brooding confession, "Rain King" rolls with a gospel-tinged swagger, "Omaha" has a rootsy, back-porch lilt, and "A Murder of One" and "Anna Begins" ride restless, jangling grooves. "Mr. Jones", a bouncy, bittersweet singalong, was the highest-charting of four singles, climbing to number 5 on the Billboard Radio Songs chart.

The album peaked at number 4 on the Billboard 200 and went multi-platinum in several countries. There's a twist in the tale, too: the cover shows handwritten lyrics to a title song the band left off the record. They didn't play it live until more than a decade later, and it finally saw release on January 24, 2019. A two-disc deluxe edition followed on September 18, 2007, with demos and a Paris concert from December 9, 1994.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.