Last month, the Counting Crows eased back into the illuminated spotlight to perform on Seth Meyers’ late-night show, singing two of their biggest hits, “Round Here” and “Hanginaround,” prepping themselves and their fans for a big summer tour, which kicks off on Wednesday, June 11, in Florida. Despite not having released an album of original material since 2008’s Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, although 2012’s covers CD Underwater Sunshine was a brisk invigorating amalgamation of music, the Crows have not been lost in a creative desert. Touring and writing new music has continued to be at the forefront of their collective souls and come September we will finally be able to grasp what they have been creating. Titled Somewhere Under Wonderland it will entwine together recorded sonnets from Adam Duritz’s active brain, pulling in the sounds and flavors of his life that has always been the soul of his music, and kneading it into the musical bouillabaisse of his bandmates, finally making the songs ripe and juicy to the taste.
Acting more on a Jazz ensemble’s camaraderie is what makes the Counting Crows stand apart from a stereotypical rock band. They swing with bits of funk and folk, even Brazilian undertones at times, all combusting into a unique sounding, almost deep-fried New York club free for all. Having virtually the same band members since their early-90’s beginning has certainly attributed to the solidified core and given them the lucky perk of being able to run with the music without stopping to see what the other guy is doing. It’s all worn-in intuition.
When Duritz called to talk about the new tour they have coming up with Toad The Wet Sprocket, who will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of their first album Bread & Circus, he was more excited to learn I was near one his favorite cities. “You’re from one of my favorite places in the world,” he said with a hint of envy. “I’m not in New Orleans [today] so you’re better off than I am. I live in New York but my house in LA was basically a hotel for wayward boys from New Orleans,” he continued with a laugh. “All my roommates were people, at one point or another, that had all moved out from New Orleans and were living there. They’ve mostly gone back. But it’s not quite that same kind of household up here but I like it.”
Duritz ended up spending our interview time talking about the new music, the tour, fame and songwriting, giving out numerous kudos to the band members he considers equal partners on all levels. His voice ebbs and flows with the emotions behind his answers: a truth-telling excitement arises when discussing the covers CD Underwater Sunshine and new music; his speech growing quiet and serious when hitting close to his inner sanctum. Importantly, for a man who has fronted a band that has sold over twenty million albums worldwide since their inception, Duritz retains the even-keeled layers of someone who has not been touched by the death eaters of global success. At least not today.
How did you get the ball rolling on a new album?
Well, I had been collecting pieces of music for a while. Like in my phone, I had all these little chunks of things and when we finished touring last summer, I asked our bass player Millard [Powers] and our guitar player Dan [Vickrey] to come stay with me for a week or two and help me go through all these ideas and figure out what they all were and start working on songs. And we did that and started working and we got one song done and a lot of pieces done the first week. Then about a month later with the same three of us, and Immer [David Immergluck] our other guitar player, we did another week. Our first week was in August and this was in like September and we did five songs in six days that week. Then we did it again in October, finished up a few more, and then we went in to record in December, recorded most of the album in three weeks in December. Went back and finished up everything in February and I think it’s really, really good. People are flipping out that hear it. A friend of mine that was staying here a few days was listening to the music, and I had to go out and I came back two hours later and there was this one song playing over and over again, and they said, “I love this song so much. It makes me happy.” That was kind of cool. Also, we had production meetings with record labels, cause coming in with a finished album is a different thing cause we’ve been independent for a while. But it was pretty good. They were all flipping out over it when I was out there. [the band recently signed with Capitol Records]
Why can’t we have it sooner than the fall?
There’s no sense putting it out in the summer. Summer is not a good time to put out a record. Also, you want to give something plenty of set-up time. It usually takes three or four months to put out a record once it’s done. It just takes time to print everything up and get yourself set up with anything else you want to do with radio or anything else. It takes three or four months to put out a record once you’re done with it.
Are you going to be playing some of the new songs on this tour?
Yeah, I think so. I mean, you never know what we’re going to play cause we change the setlist every night along with what everyone wants to play that day. That’s kind of the point of rehearsing and stuff cause we wanted to kind of plan the summer. At this point we can play everything on the record now.
Toad The Wet Sprocket is going out with you. What is so special about them that makes you a fan of their music?
The singer (Glen Phillips) is an old friend of mine. We’ve done a lot and I’ve always been a huge fan of the songwriting. I think he is so great and even though they’ve had a lot of success as Toad in the nineties, he made a bunch of solo albums. And he just got better and better and better. It seems like every record he made, he became an even better writer. He’s also one of the greatest guys you’ll ever meet. He’s the nicest guy in rock & roll, really. So about ten years ago, they put the band back together to do some shows on the west coast with us. We just did like Christmas shows around San Francisco and LA, did like four or five shows out there with them opening for us, and it was really fun and I guess it like spurred something in them cause they started playing together more often after that. And then Glen [Phillips] wrote me like a letter or email or a text or called me about six months ago and said, “Hey, you know, we really put Toad back together and we’re playing a bunch of shows and if you’ve got anything coming up that you would like us to do, we’d love that.” So I called my manager and said, “How about Toad The Wet Sprocket for the summer?” and he said, “That’s a good idea. Are they together?” And I said, “Yeah, I just got a thing from Glen saying they are.” So we said okay. I called him back and said, “Done.” It took all of ten minutes, I think (laughs). He’s a great, great singer, a great songwriter and they’re a really cool band. It’s nice to tour with people you know every now and then, you know.
How would you describe the atmosphere or the sound of the new album? Are we going to recognize that this is Counting Crows or are we going to be kind of surprised?
I’m not sure. I really don’t have that kind of perspective on it. It sounds like us to me but it also sounds different from anything we’ve ever done before. Like the song starts and the voice comes in and you just know where you are. That’s what a bunch of people said to me last week when we were playing stuff. For me as a writer, they’re very different from anything I’ve ever written before. But I’m not sure they’re going to seem any different to a listener.
Are they different because of what inspired the lyrics or are they different in sound?
It’s like I wrote about different stuff. I mean, in the end you’re always writing about how you feel about things. But I’ve always cast them much more in straight autobiographical stories about my life; for the most part but not completely. Like, these songs are much more vivid, they’re much more stories about things. Not just about what happened to me last week. They’re much more wider-ranging than that. And they have much more imagery and they could just as easily be about Russian spies and alien invasions. They just have more variety to them that way. Not just what happened to me last week. In the end, all the songs that I’m going to write are going to be about how I feel about things. But I’ve sort of taken these in a little bit different sort of direction.
Do you think it’s your maturity?
I doubt that (laughs). It could be anything but I doubt that maturity is the answer. I don’t know, I just think I wanted to write different. I think I got a little frustrated with the way I was writing before. People grow and change. At first I thought they were less personal but one of my friends who is a songwriter who listened to the record said, “No, I think this is way more personal.” He said he felt like for years I had been writing this great big epic tragedy about being crazy and how hard it was living with being crazy and dealing with the rest of my life while I was kind of blacked out. But he said, “Really good songs but that’s not who you are. You’re not that way all day, you don’t walk around falling apart and crying all day. You’re funny too. You’re funny, you’re stupid, you have a lot of bizarre thoughts and you have a lot of really funny things that pop through your head.” And this song, he thought, was a fuller picture of me in a way. Rather than me writing this really powerful epic tragedy about what the fuck happened to me because of my poor crazy head last week, you’re spending a couple of hours inside my head with all the dumb jokes that run through it and all those bizarre thoughts and still all the emotional value. He felt like it was like, in a way, more personal cause it’s a clearer picture of maybe what I’m really like, even though it’s not essentially songs about me. He said he felt like I come through in these songs more than any other ones. And I see what he means by that.
When you were first discovering you had music in you, what came first: the melodies or the words?
Both. I’ve never written a song where I wrote the words first. I’ve written them together and I’ve written music first and then words. But I’ve never actually written a song where I wrote the words first with no music. It’s always been about music. It’s music and melodies and rhythms that make me want to write lyrics. I mean, I’m not saying I don’t write good lyrics, it’s just that it’s very much, well, I don’t think I’m a poet and I don’t think I’m a composer. I write these things that tie them both together and at least the way I write, neither of them exist without the other. It’s not poetry. These are songs. Those words are meant to bounce in between those grooves and that music. And without the music I don’t know if I’d be able to think of words to write. I don’t mean that the music is more important, they just kind of come together.
What was THE song or THE album that literally changed your life?
Well, the first record I ever bought was, I’m not sure. I may have bought them both the same day. But the first two records were certainly Michael Jackson’s Got To Be There, which I think was his first solo record. It had like “Rockin’ Robin” on it and “Got To Be There” and I can’t remember what else. And then the Jackson 5’s Greatest Hits. Those two records were the first two records I ever remember getting and the first concert I went to when I was a kid. It was a Jackson 5 concert. My parents took me when I was a really little kid. And I don’t mean the Jacksons. It was legitimately the Jackson 5. It was a rodeo in Texas and probably 1970 maybe. I was a kid. And that really knocked me out. Those songs were so good and they were so vibrant and he was such a killer singer. He was my age, a few years older than me, but it seemed like I was looking at a kid who was my age. He was probably ten or eleven and I was probably six. Maybe he was twelve, I don’t know, but he was a kid and I was a kid and they were so fucking good. Those songs and those grooves. That guitar bass groove for “I Want You Back,” I mean, I can still remember it to this day. It sticks in your head, it’s incredible. I think that’s probably the first thing.
I don’t know if that made me want to write songs but it certainly made me like, whoa, music, this is awesome (laughs). I couldn’t get enough after that. And you know, there were Beatles records right then too. My parents had all The Beatles albums and I can definitely remember those songs. But my first record was the Jackson 5 record or the Michael Jackson record. I may have bought them together. Probably because we were going to that concert. I don’t know if I heard stuff before that. I’ve just always sort of remembered the Jackson 5 stuff to really being the first stuff that blew my mind, to think, wow, this is incredible. Music is incredible.
The Counting Crows have been together over twenty years. Why do you think this band has stayed together this long with virtually no problems, at least that we know about publicly?
I’m a really good band leader (laughs). I’ve never wanted to be a solo artist. That doesn’t sound like any fun to me at all. I like playing in a band. I like the interaction. I’ve never even wanted that. So like every thought of mine from the very beginning was geared towards, how do we make this work for everybody so we can all stay together? It really occurred to me very, very early on that it didn’t matter if I deserved more or someone told me that I should get more. If I didn’t find a way to make it okay for everyone to be in the band, we weren’t going to have a band. It’s all well and good for me to make more money but if they don’t make enough money, they can’t be in the band, you know what I mean. It was just thoughts like that.
Also, to me, it seemed like writers get everything and that kind of comes from a time when you had sheet music that got drawn up for the other musicians and you’d hand them out their charts and they’d know what to play. But in a rock band everybody writes their own parts. And the truth is that’s a form of composition, at least it seemed to me it was. So from the very beginning, a third of every composition – a third to music, a third to lyrics and a third to everyone in the band who plays on it. Cause I felt like that was composition, that’s writing, and that should deserve some publishing. So I kind of geared everything that way. Like, we go on tour, we sell records – we split that evenly. Publishing is different but make it part of that too. We split money evenly, like for the concert tour or a record. I don’t know, it always seemed like we had to think about the band before anything else. And when guys joined the band, we gave them parts of the old records cause they’re playing them. They’re playing those songs live every night and that’s probably selling records for us. I mean, just everything I was thinking was geared towards making it okay for everyone in the band; not necessarily trying to figure out the math of what everybody quote/unquote deserved. Cause it just doesn’t matter what people deserve if you can’t keep your band together.
So that was always more important to me. Maybe it would have been different if we hadn’t done so well right away but we did. But we were doing that before all that stuff. I had already made these decisions about the publishing and splitting everything evenly. I mean, I see why bands break up. People are always fighting for more credit and more like, “Pay attention to me,” and more money and all the resentments that go with all that. We just don’t have those problems in our band. There’s nothing for people to resent because I’m a mopey, miserable son of a bitch (laughs). You’d be like an idiot to be jealous of me for that since I hadn’t had the best time with myself anyways (laughs). And I think the other guys recognized that. We just kind of looked out for each other for a long time. We really value each other.
You’re lucky to have a good camaraderie with your band-mates
I think it’s something that we worked at. I think it’s a decision we made early on. We’re in a band together so let’s not let this stupid shit get in the way. I try not to abuse being in charge and as a result I don’t think they’re jealous of me for being in charge. Being in charge just means more work. It’s a pain in the ass. And you know, we have arguments and I’ll get up people’s asses and yell at people about shit. But it’s about musical stuff. It’s about being lazy at their job, which is this thing that we all do together. It’s not about like I personally dislike you, you know what I mean. It’s like having a bunch of brothers. And your siblings, you’ll kill them after a while. You fight with each other but you’re also like, you go on stage every night and depend on these guys. We’ve been doing that for a long time now and I think you have to make a real effort to being in a band, because it’s hard to collaborate on something with seven people that everybody really cares about, because automatically by caring about stuff, you disagree. And if it really matters to you, you can disagree pretty strongly. And we do that.
But we’ve always made the decision to really keep it out of that other shit. I have a lot of friends in a lot of bands that could not manage to do that shit and could not manage to not be petty at times. A really good friend of mine who I love dearly but I can see why they made mistakes in their band and why those bands aren’t around anymore. They just didn’t do the things that were necessary and they weren’t willing to sacrifice whatever they thought they deserved at times. Sometimes you just have to do that cause it doesn’t matter. You want to be in a band? You’ve got to find a way to make it work for everybody. And we’ve really worked on that and I’m pretty sure that’s why we’re still together. Also, we didn’t take any shit from anybody. We didn’t compromise a whole lot. We did the records we wanted to make and we kind of did our own thing. There’re not a lot of bad memories from where we compromised in a bad way with anybody. Like our records or hate them, they are our records and we made them the way we wanted to make them. They don’t have anything to do with anybody else. And that’s nice.
Have you done any more work on your play, Black Sun?
Well, it’s just really hard because I keep having to go out on tour and my collaborator who is helping me write it, he’d make a movie and then I had a record to do and then he’d get another play up on Broadway and then he’d go do another movie. It’s just been really hard to finish it. We did it at Ojai Playwrights Conference years ago. We got invited to it, which is a very prestigious writing conference, and we put up a version of it, a workshop of it there, and people freaked out. It was really good. But it’s just been so hard to finish it. With our two schedules, we both have a lot of responsibilities and between the two of us, it takes up a lot of time. We’ve not been able to finish it. But I hope we finish it eventually cause it’s really good.
What still excites you about making music?
Everything about it really. None of that has changed. I still like it. I really like being on stage with the band playing. I like collaborating. I like going in the studio and working on arrangements. Taking something that is like this skeleton of some music that I came up with on the piano or that I wrote with some of the other guys in the band, going in and working with a producer and turning that into a song. Writing harmonies together. All the shit we do. And then going out and doing it every night. I dig that. And this year, even more so than most, this is the most I’ve had the other guys around when I’ve been writing. Having those four sessions when everybody was there. I mean, I’ve done stuff with everybody before but never so like purposefully and never like when they were here for the whole of everything, all four of those guys: Me, Immer, Dan and Millard were here the whole time together. We did a whole album full of work. Even where I wrote stuff myself, there’s no way it gets written without them to bounce things off of. It was kind of cool. Somehow it’s getting better. I think a lot of the difficulties of playing music just have to do with growing up. You’ve got to pay attention to other people, not just yourself. You’ve got to listen to everybody so you can hear what they’re doing so you know what you should be doing. And that’s hard to do at first. You’re really into playing as opposed to listening. But then you get there and I feel like we’ve become a way better band in the last few years. We’ve gotten to be a way better live band and it just seems like we’re getting better at what we’re doing. It’s weird.
Is there any chance you will do another covers album? I really enjoyed it and I liked the way you did the Gram Parsons song, “Return Of The Grievous Angel.”
I love that too. You know, I think we will eventually. I don’t know when but it was such a good experience. I think there’s something about playing other people’s songs that is really eye-opening in a way and you look at different ways at using words and rhymes and melodies; different ways of putting chords together, different ways of playing grooves, different ways of thinking about the world and the way they write it. And spending a record doing that really makes you think how limiting it is spending your whole career playing one person’s songs. I say that, even though that person in our band is me. But to spend a whole career playing just my songs is a huge waste. Especially after we made that record. It was so cool to be doing all this other material and get to experience all this other stuff, and I don’t know what about it did it but we started playing live gigs immediately after that and it was like, whoa, what the fuck happened to us?! We’ve always been a good live band but we got great after Underwater Sunshine. Like, we got really great. We took a huge leap forward and I credit it to that record and I don’t know why.
We went to make this record and we were so much better at collaborating. It was just really good. So yeah, to me, it’s like, I don’t think it’s a bad exercise every few years to do some of that stuff because it’s a great exercise in playing music. It does something really good for you. It’s like collaborating with people who aren’t there. Like, you get to work with all these other writers, even though they’re not in the studio with you; but their songs are. I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on it but there was something really, really good about Underwater Sunshine for our whole band. On top of the fact that I absolutely love the record. It might be, to me, our most enjoyable record until this new one. It’s just something very listenable about it and it’s really great. And to get to play and talk about all these great songs by friends of ours, by other artists, it’s probably the most obscure covers album ever made (laughs)
It definitely has an eclectic choice of songs and artists
But it makes sense in a way cause our only criteria was that they were really great songs and that we could find a really good way into them. And the truth is, there are so many more songs out there than the ones that people have heard. And when you are music geeks, you tend to know those songs. You know the songs that everyone hears too but you also know this huge bank of music no one listens to. So it makes sense. There is so much more music. You’re a music writer so it’s probably the same for you. There is so much more music that you know and love than most people know and love probably. So given a choice of what songs to play, you’re going to have more songs that you know and love that are obscure, just because most songs are obscure, most songs aren’t well known. That’s just the way it works. So I think the only thing we did was NOT make fame a criteria. We just made good songs a criteria and finding a way into them and as a result it kind of makes sense that it turned out that way cause there is just so many songs that nobody knows.
I thought with the Gram Parsons song, you guys gave it a new atmosphere from what Gram and Emmylou Harris originally did.
Yeah, it has a more waltz swing on it and we did it much more straight-forward country-rock. We just really kind of made it like a Chuck Berry or Carl Perkins tune. We really like barreled through it. It’s funny, I didn’t even realize that we’d done it and then we were playing a Bluegrass festival and Emmylou was playing right before us. We were the headliner and she was playing right before us and she had heard we had did this song and we were like, “You want to play it with us?” and she said sure. We didn’t rehearse until right before we went on stage and she came off stage and we sat in her dressing room backstage and we ran through it and that’s when I realized, Oh shit, I’ve changed the melodies, they don’t match her harmonies anymore, and I’ve completely changed the feel of the song. She’s singing it much more of a swingy, sing-song-y feel (humming melody) and I was much more straight-ahead (laughs). I was like, I’m going to have to adjust this on-the-fly as we’re singing, cause I’m not asking Emmylou to change the way she sings her harmonies. That’s crazy. She’s been singing the fucking song for forty years (laughs). I’m not going to ask her to change it. I’m going to have to change it on-the-fly. So I was kind of like adjusting my melody while the band is still playing this straight-ahead rock version. I’m adjusting my melody to try and swing it to sing it with Emmylou (laughs). It was both wonderful to be singing with Emmylou Harris and horrible to be fucking it up so much. But it made me realize how different our version is cause I hadn’t really thought about it. Cause you don’t notice it. You just start singing it, your version, and you don’t think of them all the same for a while and then you get into a situation like that and you realize, wow, okay, we’ve definitely changed that song. Oops (laughs). Which is what you’re supposed to do anyway.
I would just be happy to see Emmylou. She is wonderful.
Oh my God, she has the most beautiful voice. It’s like silver. Just a beautiful voice.
“Round Here” was such a huge song for you. After all these years does it still resonate with you like it did then?
Oh very much. That’s one of those songs I wrote off the top of my head. I wrote it when we were going around and around. I was in my band The Himalayans before Counting Crows and that’s actually a Himalayans song that Counting Crows covered at the beginning. It’s one where we were jamming on this song at our rehearsal space and I was just singing stuff off the top of my head and I went back later and took the tapes home with me and almost the entire song was already there. I edited it down but it was all there. I think it was very much about going out in the world and trying to grow up and what it means to grow up and what other things you actually have to do as opposed to the clichés other people tell you. Like, the guy in this song is trying to find his way in the world and he hangs on to these clichés, like “Round here we always stand up straight” or “Round here we all look the same.” These things are the kind of things about being an adult that parents tell little kids about growing up: stand up straight, don’t be late for things you have to go to, you know. “Nobody makes us wait.” So they are kind of like hollow. They don’t really mean anything. And he’s trying to find his way into like adulthood holding onto these kinds of clichés that don’t really work for him. And he’s wandering through the world and he’s seeing all these things that are affecting him one way or another and these people and he keeps coming back to these like maxims. “Talk like lions, sacrifice like lambs.” What do those things really mean for a real person as opposed to just clichés that adults throw at kids. And he’s mystified by that because it doesn’t make any sense to him. And they’re not really working but he’s looking and seeing a lot of stuff.
To me, the song is just as meaningful now as it was then. Maybe more so because I’ve been out in the world a lot more now and I’m still trying to figure things out. And the one thing that made it so vital every night is that we would take it and go wherever we wanted with it every night. Like, we often in the middle of “Round Here” would go off on a tangent somewhere else and then come back and end the song, so it’s often a ten minute song. It can go all kinds of different places and that makes it very present-tense to me because the part we’re all improvising and making up right at that moment is literally happening at that moment so it’s going to be tied to things that are concerning me at that moment. And the cool thing about this record is that’s something that we’ve always done with a lot of our songs live, taking them on these tangents and going somewhere else with them. And we’re kind of famous for doing that.
But I’ve always wanted to write a song like that, where it’s part of the song itself and I’ve never fully been able to do that, to recreate the kinds of things we do improvisationally in a song on a record until this record. The first song on the record, “Palisades Park,” is going to end up about eight minutes long I think. And it’s like that. It goes through a bunch of different movements before coming back to where it was in the beginning and it really does take you on this same kind of trip you get at our live concerts with “Round Here” and any of those songs. The first eight minutes of the record is just this trip. It’s really cool. It’s really beautiful and moving and it’s got some breath to it.
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