S T A T S

A B O U T

"Mister Jones" is the third track on The Counting crows's album "August and Everything After". It went to number five on the Billboard charts, thus fulfilling the prophecy of the lyrics.

"Mr. Jones" is Marty Jones, a friend of lead singer Adam Duritz. Before Duritz joined Counting Crows, they were in a band together called The Himalayans.

This was written by lead singer Adam Duritz and guitarist David Bryson. On an episode of VH1's Storytellers, Adam explained: "It's really a song about my friend Marty and I. We went out one night to watch his dad play, his dad was a Flamenco guitar player who lived in Spain, and he was in San Francisco in the mission playing with his old Flamenco troupe. And after the gig we all went to this bar called the New Amsterdam in San Francisco on Columbus and we got completely drunk. And Marty and I sat at the bar staring at these two girls, wishing there was some way we could go talk to them, but we were too shy. We kept joking with each other that if we were big rock stars instead of such loser, low-budget musicians, this would be easy. I went home that night and I wrote a song about it. I joke about what it's about, that story. But it's really a song about all the dreams and all the things that make you want to go into doing whatever it is that seizes your heart, whether it's being a rock star or being a doctor or whatever. Those things run from 'all this stuff I have pent up inside of me' to 'I want to meet girls because I'm tired of not being able to.' It is a lot of those things, it's about all those dreams, but it's also kind of cautionary because it's about how misguided you may be about some of those things and how hollow they may be too. Like the character in the song keeps saying, 'When everybody loves me I will never be lonely,' and you're supposed to know that that's not the way it's gonna be. I knew that even then. And this is a song about my dreams."

Duritz: "This is a song that has been misinterpreted greatly, to say the least. I think people too often look for symbolism in songs when they're simpler than they seem. This, in particular, is much simpler than it must seem to a lot of people. I have heard everything from it being about some ancient blues man who taught me to play music, which is completely ridiculous, but like somebody's movie fantasy. I've also heard it's about my dick, which is even more ridiculous. When we did the interview for Rolling Stone, I walked with David Wilde into the Musee d'Orsay in Paris one day and the first thing that happened was these two kids ran up to us and said, 'Hey! You're the guy from Counting Crows, right?' And I said, 'yeah.' And he said, 'Is Mr. Jones about your dick?' I wanted to kill the guy because I knew where that was going to end up, which is the first paragraph of the article in Rolling Stone.

All the band members are huge fans of the group Big Star. When performing this song on Saturday Night Live, Duritz changed the line "I Wanna be Bob Dylan" to "I Wanna Be Alex Chilton." Alex Chilton is the frontman for Big Star, and "Alex Chilton" was the name of the song by The Replacements. In the Replacements song they referred to him as "An invisible man with a very visible voice."

This song refers to a dancing woman named Maria: "Cut up Maria, show me one of them Spanish dances." This character appears in many of their songs. She is the main subject of their second single, "Round Here": "Maria says she's dying, through the front door I see her crying," and "Maria came from Nashville with a suitcase in her hand." In "Mrs. Potter's Lullabye," Duritz sings, "There's a piece of Maria in every song that I sing." She is also mentioned on the background writing on the cover of August And Everything After. The identity of Maria has never been revealed, which leads many to believe that she is not a real person, but a symbol for loneliness, desire, or something similar.

Fun Facts: The band stopped playing this song live for awhile during the height of their fame when the meaning behind the lyrics started to lose a bit of their punch... -songfacts.com

Lyrics

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