1999 single by Counting Crows
"Hanginaround" is a song by American rock band Counting Crows. It is the first track on their third album, This Desert Life (1999).[1] Released on October 18, 1999, the song reached number 28 on the US Billboard Hot 100, becoming their biggest hit on the chart from this album. It also reached number one on the Billboard Triple-A chart, their second number-one single on this listing.
Outside the United States, "Hanginaround" became the band's fifth top-10 single in Canada, reaching number three on the RPM 100 Hit Tracks chart, and peaked within the top 50 in Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. In April 2022, American Songwriter ranked the song at number nine on their list of "The Top 10 Counting Crows Songs".[2]
Background
As with on much of the This Desert Life album, Hanginaround saw the band experimenting with different recording techniques - in this case, utilizing looping. The song consists of eight different piano loops arranged in various configurations in setup inspired by Brian Wilson's Smile project.[3] According to Counting Crows fansite anna-begins.com, Duritz says:
So I was sort of ... semi-celebratory about that but also [thinking] 'Where am I going?' It's about a wild time when I was growing' up. Living a bit of a wild life, celebrating that. It's also about being scared that you don't have a future, but I don't think that's a waste. In the end, the guy just decides to continue having fun and to worry about it later.[4]
In an interview with Songfacts, Adam Duritz summed up his thought process behind the lyrics by stating "The idea of a song created with loops made me think of being on a loop myself. I wrote that song about when I was younger and the latter years in Berkeley and how I loved it there, but I was kind of going nowhere."[3]
Music video
The music video for the song shows the band performing the song in a living room of a house surrounded by a large crowd (which includes actress Meredith Salenger), as well as Adam Duritz waiting at a bus stop on a clear, colorful day. Throughout the video, the scene changes constantly, from people walking by (including one woman naked with her exposed areas blurred) to a construction crew removing the bench and replacing it with a bus canopy they built, to the other band members performing with Adam. At the end, a woman walks up to the canopy and sits next to Adam. After he glances at her necklace, a bus pulls up. Many others board it first, and as the woman is about to do so, she asks Adam to ride with her. He agrees, and gets on. The video ends with the crowd in the living room applauding the performance, and the bus (with posters of the band's "This Desert Life" album cover on the back of it) driving away from the stop.
