Kickin’ My Heart Around

You are locked into The Zoo, the place where album rock still gets room to breathe, and the cut spinning right now is “Kickin’ My Heart Around,” the opening punch of The Black Crowes’ fifth studio album, By Your Side. Columbia shipped that record on January 12, 1999, after the Robinson brothers had spent the better part of 1998 rewriting their own map. Marc Ford and Johnny Colt were already gone. Audley Freed had been brought in on second guitar and Sven Pipien on bass, yet when the tape rolled at Avatar Studios in New York — the old Power Station, Hell’s Kitchen, same rooms that had heard everybody from Bruce Springsteen to the Stones — Rich Robinson played every guitar part himself. Chris sang. Steve Gorman hit. Eddie Harsch held the keys. Kevin Shirley, the producer they call the Caveman, stood behind the glass and told them to stop decorating and start swinging. The result was the leanest Crowes record since Shake Your Money Maker, eleven songs, no fog machine, no seven-minute coda hiding in the weeds.

“Kickin’ My Heart Around” was not some leftover from the abandoned 1997 sessions that the band had tagged Band. Shirley asked for a straight rocker, the kind of song a radio station could not ignore, and the brothers wrote it on the spot before he had even signed the contract. Chris and Rich share the credit, same as the rest of the album. The track clocks in at three minutes and forty seconds, a tight little argument built on a grinding riff, a backbeat that refuses to sit still, and Chris Robinson pushing a lyric about a relationship that has gone from sweet to sport. He is not pleading. He is calling the bluff. Columbia dropped the song as the first single on November 2, 1998, weeks before the album streeted. It climbed the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and parked at number three, holding that peak for ten weeks from late November. It also showed up on the Canadian and British rock lists. On January 11, 1999, the band walked onto the Late Show with David Letterman and played it live, one day before the American album release. They had already taped a Hard Rock Live set for VH1 at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York the previous September. The Souled Out Tour opened in theaters that February, and more than half the By Your Side track list stayed in the set.

The album itself landed at number 26 on the Billboard 200 and drew the usual split verdict. Some writers heard too much Rod Stewart and too much Exile on Main St. Most heard a band that had remembered how to hit a chorus. Chris’s voice was in full rasp-and-gospel form. Rich’s guitar was dry, loud, and right up front. The booklet art included a satellite photograph of the continental United States, city lights scattered like a circuit board, which felt about right for a record that wanted to sound like a bar on the highway and a radio station at the same time. Dirty Dozen horns, a flute from Zoe Thrall, and a stack of background singers — Curtis King, Cindy Mizelle, Tawatha Agee, Brenda White King, Vaneese Thomas — fattened a few other tracks, but “Kickin’ My Heart Around” did not need the choir. It needed the riff, the pocket, and the attitude.

The brothers who wrote it grew up in Atlanta. Chris Robinson arrived on December 20, 1966. Rich followed on April 24, 1969. They started a band in 1984 under the name Mr. Crowe’s Garden, playing a jumble of punk, R&B, and whatever else fit in a rehearsal room, and renamed themselves The Black Crowes in 1989. American Recordings and Rick Rubin put Shake Your Money Maker out in 1990. “Jealous Again,” a cover of Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle,” and “She Talks to Angels” turned a Georgia bar band into a multi-platinum concern and put them on the road with heartland acts and arena headliners who did not always enjoy the company. The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion followed in 1992 and debuted at number one. Amorica in 1994 arrived with a cover some chains refused to stock. Three Snakes and One Charm in 1996 stretched the songs and the arguments. By the time By Your Side showed up, the Crowes had already been called a throwback, a threat to the grunge status quo, and the best live American rock band of their generation, sometimes in the same week. Chris and Rich fought in public the way only brothers can. The records kept coming anyway.

After By Your Side came Lions in 2001, a split, a reunion, another split, and the famous stand with Jimmy Page that produced Live at the Greek. The 2019 reunion tour rebuilt the old audience room by room. Happiness Bastards arrived in 2024. In 2025 the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame finally opened the door. A Pound of Feathers, the newest studio set, is out now, and the Southern Hospitality run with Whiskey Myers has been putting the brothers back in sheds and amphitheaters across the map. Through all of that, “Kickin’ My Heart Around” still works the way a great AOR single is supposed to work. It does not ask you to study it. It asks you to turn it up. The groove is closer to the Faces than to anything that was charting alongside it in 1998, and Chris sells the kiss-off without winking at the camera. Rich’s rhythm part is the whole argument: simple, mean, and impossible to sit through without moving.

That is the kind of record The Zoo was built to play. No clocks, no countdowns, no commercials barging in between the second verse and the ride-out. If you want the station that still treats a Black Crowes deep cut like it matters, you are already in the right room at The Zoo. The band keeps the books at the official Black Crowes site, posts the road news on Facebook, runs the photos through Instagram, and drops the short dispatches on X. The faithful gather under the Crowe-Mafia banner at the official fan community, where presales, old board tapes, and the long argument about set lists never really stop. Spin it again if you want. “Kickin’ My Heart Around” does not wear out. It just gets louder.