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"Raining in Baltimore" • Counting Crows (by Thad DeVassie)

  • Thad DeVassie
  • Jun 29
  • 3 min read

We’ve been at this for over half an hour and she is unwilling to let it go. Raining in Baltimore is absolutely about the weather, about unrelenting rain, she says, or demands that I understand, a declaration that has morphed into an unexpected win-at-all-cost argument. We listen to it again from the old cassette I gave her that summer, when things were hot, when Counting Crows were young and starting to soar. 


We are in her mother’s Pontiac, the one willed to us after she passed. She does not know that I know she sneaks out here a few times a week to sit on the bench seats in silence with a pack of Winstons, the window cracked about an inch with a cigarette held high, just like her mother. 


She is behind the wheel. I sit on the passenger side. We are parked in the garage, door still down, draining the car battery. We can feel 1994 bubbling up from within us as the music plays. Her body tenses up. She is between softly singing and lip-syncing with her eyes closed, not wanting her own voice to interfere with Adam Duritz’s pleas. On certain words, and also with the tenderness of sparse piano chords, goosebumps crop up on her bare forearms. 


She keeps her eyes shut until he gets to the point about needing a raincoat. She looks my way but not at me, and nods as if to say, see what I mean? She does this all seven times he repeats the line. Abandoning any emotional intelligence, I remind her that he needs a phone call five times, and big love, too. I get to the point: It’s not about the weather. It’s about longing and memory and regret and the fear of forgetting about what once mattered. The urban rain is a metaphor for making it feel oppressive and hopeless. She shakes her head, disregarding the overt and awful mansplaining, hair draping her face, then hits rewind-play, rewind-play, until she queues up the song again. We’ve kept these old cassettes long after our friends moved on to CDs and back to vinyl, plastic proof of a hesitancy to accept change, to let go and move on. 


Oh yeah, she bursts out on the verge of yell-crying, then why does he repeat the need for a raincoat another four times at the end? Four! She waits for Duritz to catch up, her open palms hit the steering wheel each time the singer utters really and raincoat. Hot tears roll with an anger that supersedes loss. 


The song ends again. I reach for her hand and she withholds it. There is a brief silence, then the final track of side two starts to play, which is like a dam breaking, a rage-weep washing out the opening chords. The song change, the relative ease of transition – of moving on and out of endings to tape hiss to something new – is yet another way sad songs tank us: making date-stamped memories malleable, capable of fitting new circumstances decades later. 


She climbs into the back seat, tucks herself into a fetal position, a form of rewind – perhaps imagining a mother opening the car door with a cigarette already lit, taking the wheel with her little girl safely in the back, maybe even asking if she grabbed her raincoat for the impending storm. And that is when I hear her, barely audible, push out a whimper of speak-singing – Somewhere out in America it's starting to rain, could you tell me the things you remember about me? But that is a different Crows song entirely, one that exists on a cassette we lost long ago. 



Thad DeVassie is a writer and artist/painter from Ohio. He writes because he can't sing. He paints because he doesn't play an instrument. His work has appeared here, there and all over the place, which you can find at www.thaddevassie.com.

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