Counting Crows

Angels of the Silences is a song by Counting Crows for their 1996 sophmore album Recovering the Satellites. It was the lead single for the album, peaking at number #3 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. Musically, it is much heavier than their previous work on August and Everything After, which is true for all of Recovering the Satellites. The song appears on their greatest hits compilation, Films About Ghosts. An acoustic rendition of the song is featured on their live double-album, Across A Wire, along with a regular live version of the song. On the meaning of the song, Adam Duritz said this on Storytellers: "I write quite a few songs where the sort of issue is faith, having faith, keeping faith, and this song in particular is about the difficulty in having faith in things, and finding things to have faith in, in yourself, in God, in like he said, in a woman. Faith is a weird thing, it in a sense it is all about waiting. It's not actually about getting anything, you know, faith is about the wait, because once you get something there is no need anymore, and so a lot about faith is just the willingness to sort of throw yourself on a fence and hang there for a while. That's a very difficult and bitter thing, you know. In this song the, I keep saying the main character, 'I' I said, 'All my sins, I would pay for them if I could come back to you' It's not just about finding things to believe in. It's about wanting to be able to believe in anything too, and it's about all the voices that get inside your head and whisper for you to do it or not to do it as well, and it's called "Angels of the Silences"."