“If you think you might come to California/ I think you should.”

The tears came before we even made it down to The Shell to see Counting Crows on September 3. She didn’t expect them. But she hadn’t heard their hit “Round Here” in close to 30 years, and when we played it over the car’s crummy speakers...

Round here we talk just like lions, but we sacrifice like lambs/ Round here, she’s slipping through my hands…

“‘Round here’ is wishing something was different than it is, always longing,” she said later, when we were inside the venue and seated at our table. “I heard that song a million times, but I never cried until I heard it at 50. I was surprised. Just streaming hot tears. It just opened up and came — wash, wash, just washing out.”

She hadn’t heard it because I couldn’t stand the song, couldn’t stand the album it was on, thought Counting Crows were whiny posers. What I hated most was the screamed “Yeeeeaaaahh” at the end of “Rain King.” She understood my reaction, but disagreed, then and now. “It’s like when you don’t know how to wrap up a thing, you just have to yelp — to end it, so it doesn’t just keep going. And they weren’t posers. There’s poetry there, stories there. He’s vulnerable, and he shares his pain. Some voices have that timbre that resonates with pain, like Emmylou Harris. And I don’t think I’d heard a voice like that, that yelled but was melodic. But it’s kind of fragile. If you’re with somebody that doesn’t like it…”

So she listened to it when I wasn’t around. “You could hear them and almost hear yourself. You felt like everything that was happening to them was happening to you. They felt like California when I was in California, but even when I was back in Kansas City, I remember listening to them after work at the restaurant. There would be some little kickback, and Counting Crows would be put on, and it was like we were all there for that whole story, for the whole album. They kind of got us and we kind of got them, and they were our friends but they weren’t. It was like when you’re in a good conversation: you don’t want to leave. No one ever wanted to change the disc and leave it.”

How do you love a girl when you don’t love the music that moves her? You shut your mouth, buy her the band’s next album, and smile as you put it into the CD tray. And if you’re lucky, it’s got a song on it finally gets through to you the way “Long December” got through to me.

The smell of hospitals in winter, and the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters, but no pearls…

The show at the Shell was rough music polished to a high shine, lead singer Adam Duritz rolling out onto the stage in black denim and a Pink Floyd T-shirt, looking like a cross between Colin Farrell and Judd Nelson, pausing to look out into the audience and comment, “You can imagine our surprise when we got here tonight and found we were playing dinner theater. It’s pretty rare for a rock and roll show to play where there are tables. I guess that makes it special…but never again. It has to be uncomfortable, sitting at tables.”

Tell that to the guy just in front of me, the one with the close-cut gray hair and steel framed glasses, sitting in his short-sleeve button-down shirt beside his wife, holding her hand except when he played air guitar, working his way through a shared bottle of white wine, and singing along with every dang word. Every now and then, he’d turn and say something to his son at the next table, who was there with his wife. The old guy looked so happy, except when he dropped out of the moment to do some recording with his phone. Then he just looked intent. (The Shell made that amateur camera work part of the show, expertly zooming in on the phone screen and plastering the image on the huge screens flanking the stage — the mediation of a mediated experience.)

When “Round Here” showed up in the set list, we stood and swayed, tables and chairs be damned.

“How did that hit?” I asked after the show.

“Not the same at all,” she replied. “He didn’t sing it the same.” It was true, but you can’t blame a guy for noodling a bit after 30 years. “You know what he did sing the same? ‘Long December,’ right there at the end. That’s when his voice really opened up.”