Daylight Fading is the third track on the Counting Crows second album, Recovering the Satellites.

I have no idea if Adam Duritz meant it to be or not, but it seems to me that this is a suicide song. It also seems to me that there's still some hope for recovery. Follow me here:

The singer (and I'm gonna pretend he's male from here on...seems likely later) is clearly lonely and depressed. That's not a big shock for anyone familiar with Duritz's writing. He/she is "waiting for the telephone to tell me I'm alive." It seems likely that the person that the singer was trying to attract is involved with someone else. Now, "It's getting cold in California. I guess I'll be leaving soon." Well, I'm interpreting that "leaving soon" as "I'm done with this. It's not going to get any better, so I might as well give up and get out now."

Daylight fading
Come and waste another year
All the anger and the eloquence are bleeding into fear.
Moonlight's creeping 'round the corners of our lawn
When we see the early signs of daylight fading
We leave just before it's gone.

Substituting fear for emotion sounds pretty distressed to me. But on the other hand, the moonlight is only creeping in, and we leave before it's dawn. Leaving the idea of suicide behind sounds good to me. It's not exactly hopeful, but it could be a start.

In the second verse, it seems like a girl is trying to talk him out of it (hence my possibly false assumption of the masculinity of the singing character),

But all the things I keep inside myself
They vanished in the air
Tell me that you'll wait for me
I say, "I won't be here."
I want to say goodbye to you, goodbye to all my friends
Goodbye to everyone I've known

Well, that sounds pretty bad again, but here comes the chorus again. He's backing away from the edge.

I don't know. Like I said before, this is what I've been taking away from this song lately. Am I wrong? Could be.

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