Adam Duritz wrote the song that would save his second album in two hours, between four and six in the morning, in the bedroom of a rented house at the top of a Hollywood hill, having walked out of the studio at 2am after another long day visiting a friend in intensive care. The song was "A Long December". The friend was Jennifer, who had been hit by a car earlier that month and spent most of January 1996 in hospital. Counting Crows had just begun recording the follow-up to August and Everything After, an album that had gone seven times platinum in the United States and put Duritz on the cover of Rolling Stone with the headline "The Biggest New Band In America". The pressure was enormous. The singer was, by his own account, in pieces.
Recovering the Satellites is the record he and his band made out of that pressure. Released by DGC/Geffen on 15 October 1996 and produced by the English studio veteran Gil Norton, it is louder, angrier and lonelier than the debut, an album about the cost of getting what you asked for. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, sold two million copies in the United States alone, and produced in "A Long December" the band's biggest international hit. It also ended the easy mythology that Counting Crows were a sunny roots-rock revival act in the manner of Van Morrison or The Band. By the time the credits rolled on its cover photograph, a green-tinted snapshot of a child's drawing of a star, the group had a different reputation, one that would carry them through the rest of the decade.
The autumn of 1996 was a strange place to release a moody, piano-led, second album. The American charts were still working through the long tail of grunge and the early swell of pop-punk; Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill remained inescapable a full year after its release; Beck's Odelay had won the kind of critical adoration the Crows had been awarded only two years earlier. Hip-hop was rising fast, with the Fugees' The Score and 2Pac's All Eyez on Me dominating cultural conversation. The week Recovering the Satellites debuted at number one, it knocked Tracy Chapman's New Beginning off the top after eight non-consecutive weeks and held off Toni Braxton's Secrets and a fresh release from R.E.M.
The world the album walked into was also, briefly, a place where a guitar band could still go straight to number one. The Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was a year old and still selling; the Wallflowers' Bringing Down the Horse was about to become unavoidable; Pearl Jam's No Code arrived a few weeks earlier as a deliberately difficult successor to Vitalogy. Counting Crows' decision to follow a feel-good debut with a darker, harder record fit the broader mood: nineties guitar acts, having got everything they asked for, were increasingly suspicious of it.
Counting Crows had formed in Berkeley, California in 1991 around Duritz, a former Himalayans frontman, and producer-guitarist David Bryson. By the time they were signed to Geffen by Gary Gersh in 1992 the deal was so generous the music press nicknamed them Accounting Crows. August and Everything After arrived in September 1993, produced by T-Bone Burnett, and was carried first by "Mr. Jones" and then by "Round Here" into a level of success the band had not expected and were not prepared for. They filled in for Van Morrison at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January 1993, played Saturday Night Live a year later, opened for the Rolling Stones, the Cranberries, Bob Dylan and Midnight Oil, and watched the debut sell more than seven million copies in the United States alone. The Chicago Sun-Times later observed that, at the time, it was the fastest-selling record since Nirvana's Nevermind.
It also broke their singer. Duritz had a widely reported nervous breakdown in 1994. Drummer Steve Bowman was fired towards the end of that year and replaced by Ben Mize. The touring band added a second guitarist in Dan Vickrey. By the time everyone got off the road in 1994, the lineup that would record the second album was new in two key positions and exhausted in every other.
Duritz spent most of 1995 not on tour, an unusual luxury at the height of an album cycle and a deliberate one. The band played only two shows the entire year. The intention was to give the singer time to write, and he did, in hotel rooms during the previous tour and then more seriously at home. The songs that emerged were drawn directly from the experience of becoming famous: lines such as "These days I feel like I'm fading away / Like sometimes when I hear myself on the radio" from "Have You Seen Me Lately?", and a title track that openly weighed the idea of starting again from scratch.
Duritz wrote the bulk of the album alone at the piano, with several of the more aggressive tracks built up by the full band in the room. Two songs that he later said he simply could not figure out how to sequence into the running order were cut: "Chelsea" and "Good Luck", both of which featured horns played by friends from New Orleans' Soul Rebels Brass Band. "Chelsea" eventually surfaced as a bonus track on the 1998 live album Across a Wire: Live in New York City. "Good Luck" was thought lost for years and was assumed destroyed in the 2008 Universal Studios fire, before turning up in the early 2020s when Geffen dug through its vault for the HBO documentary on the band.
Working titles for tracks have largely vanished from the public record, but the early shape of the record was clearly heavier than what had come before. Where August and Everything After had been built around acoustic guitar, mandolin and Hammond organ, the demos for the second album were full-band rock arrangements. The band wanted to capture what they sounded like on stage, not what they could orchestrate in a studio. From: https://riffology.co/posts/the-making-of-recovering-the-satellites-by-counting-crows/
