Accidentally in Love (Shrek 2)

Adam Duritz wrote this in what sounds like a manic burst of romantic energy, and the band recorded it to match — the guitars tumble over each other, the tempo has the breathless quality of someone talking too fast, and the arrangement builds with the generosity of a group that wants you to feel what they feel right now. The Counting Crows have always been a band made of contradictions: alternately tender and bombastic, self-aware and completely guileless, and this track lands on the giddy end of that spectrum. Duritz's voice is famously expressive to the point of excess — he lets it crack and surge, he phrases things with theatrical emphasis, he sounds perpetually on the edge of being overwhelmed by his own feelings, which turns out to be genuinely contagious. The song is about falling in love accidentally, and the genius of it is that it actually sounds accidental: the momentum carries you along before you've decided you wanted to go. The Shrek 2 soundtrack used it as a kind of euphoric punctuation — the love story working out, the world opening up — and the sequence became one of the most memorable in DreamWorks animation. It belongs to a lineage of big-hearted pop-rock that the nineties produced in abundance, the kind that isn't trying to be cool, just trying to make you feel something. Best experienced at high volume, ideally with the windows down.