Lyric Analysis: "Mr. Jones" The Counting Crows

LET'S DO THIS:

I was down at the New Amsterdam
Staring at this yellow-haired girl
Mr. Jones strikes up a conversation with this black-haired flamenco dancer
You know she dances while his father plays guitar
She's suddenly beautiful
We all want something beautiful
Man, I wish I was beautiful
So come dance this silence down through the morning
Sha la la la la la la la la yea
Uh huh
Yea
Cut up, Maria!
Show me some of them Spanish dances
Pass me a bottle, Mr. Jones
Believe in me
Help me believe in anything
I want to be someone who believes
Yea
Mr. Jones and me tell each other fairy tales
And we stare at the beautiful women
She's looking at you
Ah, no, no, she's looking at me
Smiling in the bright lights
Coming through in stereo
When everybody loves you
You can never be lonely

Well, I wanna paint my picture
Paint myself in blue and red and black and gray
All of the beautiful colors are very, very meaningful
Yea you know, gray is my favorite color
I felt so symbolic yesterday
If I knew Picasso
I would buy myself a gray guitar and play
Mr. Jones and me look into the future
Yea and we stare at the beautiful women
She's looking at you
Uh, I don't think so. She's looking at me
Standing the spotlight
I bought myself a gray guitar
When everybody loves me, I will never be lonely

I want to be a lion
Yea, everybody wants to pass as cats
We all want to be big, big stars
Yea, but we got different reasons for that
Believe in me, because I don't believe in anything
And I want to be someone to believe
To believe, to believe to believe, yea
Mr. Jones and me stumbling through the barrio
Yeah and we stare at the beautiful women
She's perfect for you
Man, there's got to be somebody for me
I wanna be Bob Dylan
Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky
When everybody loves you,
Ah, son, that's just about as funky as you can be
Mr. Jones and me staring at the video
When I look at the television, I want to see me staring right back at me
We all want to be big stars, but we don't know why and we don't know how
But when everybody loves me, I'm going to be just about as happy as can be
Mr. Jones and me, we're gonna be big stars
c. Adam Duritz

Now, before you bust a blood vessel trying to find the meaning, read this cautionary word from Adam Duritz, the writer:

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). And I've also heard it's about my d***, which is even more ridiculous. Why do people go there, you know?

Now that we've got THAT cleared up, let's get to some nuts and bolts. Later, we'll let Mr. Duritz tell us what it meant to him when he wrote it.

First, there are very few end-rhymes, and what few there are, most often, are perfect rhymes (words that rhyme with themselves, like "beautiful," the last word of lines 5,6, and 7). Those of you familiar with the song (it was a radio hit) know how a catchy melody can make up for lack of rhyme -- it makes you unaware that there is a lack of rhyme.
Of course, there are other poetic devises such as alliteration, assonance, and consonance. But notice the story-telling precision. We don't just get a generic girl and "dancer;" we get a "yellow-haired girl" and "black-haired flamenco dancer." Lesser writers often think that by using generic terms they are enabling the listener or reader to envision whatever they want -- for instance, as a listener, maybe I would envision the girl to be brunette, rather than "yellow-haired." But such a philosophy is lazy, and gives the listener too much credit. He is listening to your song and he expects you to paint the picture for him.
Duritz makes us see the scene. He doesn't go into laborious detail - he knows what to leave in and what to leave out. Paint your word-pictures quickly; give us one or two salient facts, then let us imagine the rest. But you have to give us something. So, we are left to imagine how tall or thin the flamenco dancer might be, for instance, but she is real enough that we can fill in the gaps because Mr. Duritz has given her a couple characteristics -- her hair color and her specific dance.
I used to load my short stories with too much description. If I saw a character in my mind, I wanted the reader to see her the same way, so I would describe everything about her. If you do that, writers, people will stop reading. Those who don't will skim over the description, and envision the type of girl they want anyway. I'll say it again, pick out a couple features, features that you want to highlight, then let the reader do the rest. Mr. Duritz knows.

We must also note that the narrator wants to be Bob Dylan, and Bob Dylan will be coming to Louisville on Wednesday, June 29 at 6:30. Get your tickets May 14th. Don't be left out! Dylan and Willie Nelson at Slugger Field! Wahoo!

Okay, sorry about that. But the Dylan reference is something else that makes the picture concrete, but in a timeless way. You don't want your songs to become dated by too many "pop culturish" lyrics. Dylan was the right inclusion because he's generally regarded as a legendary figure of American music -- you wouldn't want to replace his name with the latest "cool" singer-songwriter because there's no telling if the cool one will be remembered ten years from now.

About the meaning, here's an excerpt from an interview with Duritz, regarding this song:

"I love this song because there's so many levels to it. On one level, it's a simple guy song -- but it also has to do with all the things you dream about as a young musician, and how silly and sad and helpless it is to think that everyone's going to love you if you're famous. What do you think is going to be satisfying to get these dreams fulfilled? I can't tell you why I want some of the things I want, but I want...I want...I want... The song is about how strange it is to feel like the thing that makes your dream come true and the thing that makes you appear to the world is also what makes you feel like you're sort of disappearing to yourself. I think I felt very much like I was slipping away. It didn't feel like, `wow, I'm everywhere.' It just felt kind of crappy. "I think Mr. Jones, in a lot of ways, is about dreams, but there's a cautionary element to it. The guy keeps saying, `when everybody loves me, I'll never be lonely,' and you're supposed to realize that that is probably a mistake. It's a ridiculous statement."

And from another interview:

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, we were too shy. And we thought, we kept joking with each other, that if we were big rock stars instead of such loser, low-budget musicians, we'd be able to, this would be easy. And I went home that night and I wrote a song about it.
And I joke about what's it about, that story. But it's really a song about all the dreams and all the things that make you want to go in to , you know, doing whatever it is that like seizes your heart, whether it's being a rock star or being a doctor or whatever it is, you know. And I mean, those things run from like 'all this stuff I have pent up inside of me' to , 'I want to meet girls' you know, because I'm tired of not being able to. And 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, probably. I knew that even then. And this is a song about my dreams.