It was thirty-two years ago when Adam Duritz of Counting Crows wrote a song about wanting to be famous, a rock ‘n’ roll star. He worried about being a one-hit wonder with ‘Mr. Jones’s, which of course he is decidedly not. “It was just a dream, fiction, you know, like wouldn’t this be wonderful,” he said, recapturing a youthful memory. Success came, but not everything became wonderful. Mental health, for one, was a problem that wouldn’t go away anytime soon. Happily, neither would stardom, although he questioned that in ‘Have You Seen Me Lately’ from the 1996 “Recovering the Satellites” album.
Being different as a child was something Duritz carried through into adulthood and eventually fame. He sings about it in ‘Spaceman in Tulsa’ where the narrator covers it up in clown white. “For me and others like me, art was a common denominator for celebrating who they were rather than just hiding it away.”
Duritz is wired to make things personal with his songwriting, whether being about him directly or a made-up character. There are many recurring themes, such as girls in ‘Goodnight Elisabeth,’ also from “Recovering the Satellites.” She is an old girlfriend he was dating at the time, one of several through the years with variations like Betsy, who is also in several songs like ‘I Wish I Was a Girl’ on “This Desert Life.” It becomes something like the tattoo you get that shows a heart pierced by an arrow with her name there for life. He was told not to be so specific, that people wouldn’t relate. “True or not, that didn’t seem to be a good reason to change,” he mused. “Making things personal to yourself causes the things that resonate to you to resonate to your listeners.”
For this interview, Duritz was sitting on a couch in his Manhattan apartment, sporting a black t-shirt emblazoned with The Police insignia. Isn’t it curious how musicians will often wear the t-shirts of other bands instead of their own merch? He appeared to be very relaxed and open, in a good place. And why not be excited by finally getting a terrific new album out – “Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!” – that had been languishing as an EP?
The only fly in the ointment had been releasing four songs as a suite from the new album during the pandemic-locked-down year of 2021. People had told Duritz that albums were becoming dinosaurs, and streaming individual songs was where it was at. It turns out people wanted more. “You’re told people only want to listen to single songs, but actually there’s a certain judgment if you don’t put out a whole record,” he offered. Four years, five additional songs and a few rewrites later, the Suite EP became Sweets, a full album.
Other bands from the nineties have come and gone, but Counting Crows remains with pretty much the same lineup as when it was formed in San Francisco in 1991. Dan Vickrey (lead guitar), Dave Bryson (rhythm guitar) and Charlie Bellingham (keys) are original members. Drums and bass changed in the early 2000s to Jim Bogios and Millard Powers, and multi-instrumentalist David Immerglück, who had played with the band on and off throughout the early years, joined officially in 2011.
“I knew from the start that I didn’t want to be a solo artist,” Duritz stated, praising the interaction of being in a band, one that has been active 30-plus years. “Who knows why some bands make it and some don’t? Some of it is jealousy, money, frustration, a lot of reasons not to stay together. For me, staying together has been my priority. The band is what brings out the emotion in my songs, and I appreciate that. It wouldn’t have worked out the same without them.”
With the release of “Butter Miracle,” we have exhibit number one as why those of us who love rock music should be thrilled. Counting Crows is still putting out exciting, fresh albums as well as touring America in 2025. As Duritz sings on the opening track, ‘With Love from A to Z,’ which is a love song from Adam to his girlfriend Zoe and one to his fans as well. If you come for the memories, I’ll leave you this song.
Sing your songs like they are alive right now.
Americana UK: Listening to your music over the years, I have always been curious if you were drawn to jazz. Your vocals have a scatological rhythm.
Adam Duritz: I would say it started with Ella. I was and am still a huge Ella Fitzgerald fan. I saw her play when I was 15. She was on her 72nd birthday and was incredible. Later, my dad had some Benny Goodman records that I really liked. One of them, he’d actually gotten at a Texaco station. It was part of a giveaway with a tank of gas and a windshield washing. I listened to that a bunch, and then I really got into Miles Davis.
AUK: What era of Miles attracted you?
AD: “Kind of Blue” for sure. I went through a lot of different stuff. Like a lot of people, I found the hard bop more challenging. I didn’t care for that as much, although that quintet is incredible. But I come back to “Kind of Blue” all the time. It’s probably my favorite record by anybody. I also listened definitely to a lot of Monk. I got to really love him as a songwriter and for putting your personality into your writing, how to include humor. Monk was great for that. As a songwriter myself, I explored guys like Duke Ellington, who wrote so many great songs with Billy Strayhorn, and others. There’s a wall of just jazz stuff over there (points to massive collection behind him), and that’s part of what I think I love about being in a band. Not that I’m a really informed head, but the word I always use to describe it to people is the ‘jazz’ of it. That it is a conversation more than just a statement. That’s the difference to me.
AUK: That’s the thing about jazz; it’s not static. You don’t have to play it like it is on the record.
AD: I was surprised when people wanted us to improvise because when I was a kid growing up in the years before MTV, visually seeing music meant it was different from the record because it was live performance. One of the things that MTV taught us, even just subconsciously, is that you could see music, and it could sound just like the record, because videos did that. That changed the way our whole culture approached what we expected out of live music.
AUK: With the expansion of Spotify and streaming, it seems albums are going away, which tends to inhibit creativity.
AD: There’s not a lot of surprise in getting everything you want because the one thing you can’t know you want is something you haven’t heard yet. I still listen to a lot of my music on Pandora. I’ve made a series of stations, but one of the reasons for it is that it surprises me. It plays me stuff I haven’t heard. It’s more like a radio station.
AUK: With eight albums and probably 100 or so songs on them, that is a lot of listening. As the years and albums have gone by, you seem to have become less prolific with more time in between albums. The new one is the first full-length in a decade.
AD: I think with “Saturday nights and Sunday mornings,” I was really struggling personally. When we made that, I just was not sure what I wanted to do in the years after it. I really enjoyed recording that covers album. I realized making it that it’s such a waste to spend your entire career singing one person’s songs, even if that person is me. It just feels like, as a musician, I enjoyed interpreting other stuff. I learned so much from singing other people’s songs. That period in 2010, I was also working on a theater piece, so it was the first time I’d written for people other than myself, written for women. And at the same time as I was working on that, we were doing “Underwater Sunshine,” and I was singing other people’s songs. That really opened my mind to a lot of different ways of writing, which led to some of the stuff on “Somewhere Under Wonderland,” which was one of the first times I’ve written almost fictional stories, characters that weren’t me.
Like ‘Palisades Park’ is all about how I feel, but it’s not about my life. But that record kind of disappeared, which was strange because it was the best record company, and they did more for it than any record company we’ve ever had. But it didn’t impact the culture at all. It made me think maybe we haven’t figured out in this new world how to release records. It’s not a matter of just working it to radio. I felt we needed to reexamine that because I didn’t want to write great material and then throw it down a hole. I think ‘Palisades Park’ was the best thing I’d ever written at the time, and it didn’t make much of an impression on people.
AUK: That song and ‘Elvis Went to Hollywood’ sound a lot like the material on your new record.
AD: That’s me sort of expanding the kind of ways I wanted to write lyrics as well, not just autobiographical, but commenting on all the ways I felt by telling other stories. I don’t know why it had never occurred to me before. Growing up an English major, fiction is this great prose art form, and it’s not necessary to be biographical to still talk about how you feel.
AUK: There’s this evocative passage in ‘Elvis’:” The taste of wedding cake The sound of nursery rhymes The ghosts of Fredericksburg Of Alex Chilton Of Victor Frankenstein The girl you’ll always love The one you have no memory of. What ties those figures together?
AD: They are all fading memories in the passage of time. I think I just loved Alex Chilton. I read all those Shelby Foote books when I was younger. His history of the Civil War, Fredericksburg being a big part of that, but I don’t remember exactly why those three are lumped together. Alex was a friend of mine and my idol. I grew up reading about music a lot, but when I was a kid, there were lots of records you couldn’t find, and Big Star had been something. I had never heard The Modern Lovers, Fairport Convention, Richard and Linda Thompson’s early records and Big Star, Thunderclap Newman. I found them all on this trip to England with my parents. I had been reading about them for years, and when I heard them, it changed my life. From that moment on, I was obsessed.
AUK: ‘Something in the Air’ is one of the 100 best songs ever, to state a strong opinion.
AD: Isn’t it such a great fucking song? That record was so cool. If you look on it really carefully, it names the members of the band, but the bass player’s name is Bijou Drains. And there’s a picture of the bass player from behind looking in a bathroom mirror. If you look carefully, because there’s a million pictures, it’s Pete Townshend’s face. He was the bass player in that band. They put that band together to promote Speedy Keen and Jimmy McCulloch, the other guys who were in it. They wanted to show people what great musicians they were.
AUK: Yeah, Keen was the drummer and singer/songwriter. Sort of a Don Henley figure. Speaking of bass, though, didn’t you play some?
AD: In my first band. It’s a mystery to me today how that’s possible because bass is really hard and I can’t play it at all anymore. I imagine I was just playing very simple stuff because hard bass is really hard. I wouldn’t say I play bass or play guitar. I can play piano pretty shitty. Good enough to write, but I can’t play by ear, so I’m really feeling it out. I’m a pretty good tambourine player. I’ve got a really good pocket. The guys are always kind of amazed at my timing. You could stop for a while. I’ll come back in on the beat time and pitch.
AUK: I’ve read your parents were physicians. Was your dad into music like the TV series’ Doctor House?
AD: My dad says he sang on the radio as a kid. All evidence to the contrary, but apparently, it’s true. They listened to a lot of music and had a lot of records, which I listened to, and that got me into having my own. They took us to see music. My first concert was a Jackson Five show in Texas.
AUK: How did Counting Crows start?
AD: Counting Crows was a band for a long time without playing on stage. The first iteration of the band never played any shows. We did some recording together, and that was for about a year or so. We rehearsed a lot and we recorded, but we never got out and played shows. The first real show with this band, I don’t remember where it was. Probably the Paradise Lounge in San Francisco. That version of the band had only been together a few months when we got signed, but it was the third iteration of the band.
AUK: Your band has been pretty stable through the years as opposed to you and a rotating cast of characters, I mean, musicians.
AD: Five of us were there at the beginning, and even the new guy, Millard Powers, our bass player, joined over 20 years ago. We like being in this band together, and I think we all make it a priority because of that. I realized early on that this band was what I’d always been looking for. So other things aren’t as important as keeping it together.
AUK: The song ‘Colorblind’ was interesting: Coffee black and egg white Pull me out from inside. Reading some of your personal history, I wonder if it has to do with the disassortative disorder you deal with.
AD: It’s very impressionistic, but yeah, I mean it’s about the distance between yourself and the world, having difficulty feeling things. He keeps saying, pull me out from inside. The hardest thing was playing it when I figured out that piece of music. I had to play it for hours before I could sing and play it well enough.
It’s weird. I remember meeting Neve Campbell when she was on a show called “Party of Five” back then. One thing about being in a band is that you completely lose touch with Prime Time because you’re always on tour, on stage somewhere when things are on TV. So, I got a box full of VHS tapes from her that she had the network send me so I could watch the show. As I was watching it one night, there was this little musical piece, a classical piece that went just something like, I don’t remember what it was exactly, but some little five or six-note piece. That gave me this idea, and I put the whole thing on pause and sat there playing for a while until I figured out my version of that little snippet and expanded it into a song.
AUK: That line about coffee black and eggs white reminds me of when I was talking with Elliot Murphy about what he had for breakfast. He loves breakfast. Do you have a standard breakfast?
AD: I eat a lot of different things. I am good at scrambled eggs, that makes these really soft curdy eggs, and sometimes I make those for my girlfriend. I worked a lot this year on making bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches, being able to fold the omelette the right way to be able to make a sandwich out of it. I have cereal some mornings. I like Raisin Bran and Wheaties because my grandfather really loved Product 19 when I was a kid, and they don’t make Product 19 anymore. This morning, I just had an Ensure protein shake and a fiber cracker. I like breakfast a lot, but I’m trying to get in better shape for the tour, so I’ve not been eating big ones. I think my favorite breakfast is poached eggs with toast and jam.
AUK: Is it hard to keep fit and healthy while on tour?
AD: With the medications for the dissociative stuff, it’s not great controlling your eating. This last three or four years, I’ve been exercising all the time, lifting more. I really worked the last six months on trying to willfully control my eating.
AUK: What about the health of your voice? Can you still hit the notes like you did at the beginning?
AD: I’ve lost some off the top of my range. It happens over time. Some of the songs have had to be brought down a little. I do think that my singing has gotten better, even as my voice changes. It’s a skill that you only develop by repetition. I had never taken lessons and hadn’t been in a studio much before Counting Crows began. My voice has always been fragile, though, and it doesn’t take much to wear it down. That led to a lot of chewing steroids early in my career. I did take some lessons, though, and developed a technique which helps. That and quitting smoking have probably made a difference.
AUK: Some people think you sound like Van Morrison. I guess I can see it with songs like ‘Madam George,’ but how do you feel about the comparison?
AD: That was something that stuck to us because we played when he didn’t go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We’re still probably the only unknown band to ever play there. They needed someone to play one of his songs, and we did ‘Caravan.’ I was so into it that when I came off the stage, I tripped and stumbled. There I was looking into the breasts of Etta James. And she says to me, “Are you alright. You sure sang great.” That was insane. Anyway, we did it when we were making our first record. I used to see him a lot as a kid because he lived in Marin in the Bay Area, and he played a lot of shows in little clubs. They would announce it in the Sunday section of the “Chronicle” in San Francisco, and it would be for a Monday show, with just standing-room tickets.
AUK: Do you miss playing the smaller clubs?
AD: Not really. I think they’re great, but I like that we can play for 70,000 people at a festival and still make it intimate. I don’t need the closeness of the audience. I’ve got the closeness of the band. It doesn’t matter to me if there are 20 people or 80,000 people. But one thing I noticed about Van in those shows was how much he just seemed to be doing it off the top of his head. I don’t know whether he was for sure, but he seemed to be just making it up as he went along. He had this real assured sense that whatever I do is cool because I’m exploring right now. And that’s the magic.
There’s a lot of improv. It’s very creative, and it sort of said to me, ‘ You should always be exploring. ‘ I don’t think I sound like him at all. But I have learned some lessons from him, serious lessons about just be present, that these songs are alive right now. It doesn’t matter when you wrote them – last week, last year, or 30 years ago – on stage, you sing them like they’re alive right now. You could learn that from seeing Dylan, too. Dylan sings songs a different way every year. He’s exploring what’s interesting to him. I have this sense that whatever I do is fine because that’s just what I’m doing right now, and that’s real art. You want it to be good, but there’s something to be said just for exploration.
Rock ‘n’ Roll gives us a place to be ourselves.
AUK: You’ve cut your hair shorter. The dreadlocks are gone. Do people still recognize you in the produce aisle at the grocery store?
AD: A lot less. I went to see Mike Berbiglia do his new special. It was just on HBO this week, but I saw it about a month ago at the Beacon Theatre. We went to the show with my friend Keegan Michael and his wife, me and my girlfriend. We went backstage afterwards and ran into Bob Odenkirk and Michael McKean, who are doing “Glengarry Glen Ross” on Broadway. I’m a huge fan of both those guys. I introduced myself; Keegan already knew them, but I just introduced myself as Adam. We talked for a while, and I was telling Michael McKean how much I enjoyed “This Is Spinal Tap.” Keegan’s wife, Elle, walked up and said to him, “Do you know who he is?” And he’s like, what? Adam is the lead singer of Counting Crows. Michael McKean jokingly leaned over and said, Oh, well, let me shake your hand a second time now that I know you’re famous.
As for my hair, I moved around a lot when I was a kid, very shy, and I struggled with meeting new people at new schools all the time, I think, because of the dissociative disorder. For about 30 years, I had this affidavit with the dreads on my head, where everybody knew who I was. So, people came up to me and talked to me, or if I introduced myself, they knew who I was. In the last three or four years, I’ve lost that protection, and I didn’t think about it at first. It was just nice. Although living in New York, it was never a big problem with getting mobbed here. It’s a big city.
But just lately, I’ve realized I’m much more anxious at parties. I’m not very good at introducing myself. And since everybody doesn’t know who I am necessarily, although at that same backstage after Mike’s show, I went over and said hi to Jack Antonoff (lead vocalist of Bleachers). He was standing over in the corner, and I said, Hi, I’m Adam. I’m from Counting Crows. And he said, Oh, I know who you are. I’m like, I am sorry. I can’t tell anymore whether anyone knows who I am now that I cut the dreads. And he said it was never the dreads, man. It was always you, which was sweet. But he’s a musician, so I’m not surprised that he recognizes me.
AUK: Was that song, ‘Have You Seen Me Lately, in a way dealing with celebrity?
AD: Yeah. And also dealing with people’s assumption that they know who you are after you’re famous, and that you are this thing they think you are, as opposed to who you are. It was like, it’s not just the fame, but also all the assumptions that come with it.
AUK: There was that verse about: Yeah, you got a piece of me But it’s just a little piece of me And I don’t need anyone And these days I feel like I’m fading away Like sometimes, when I hear myself on the radio.
AD: I don’t know. You have all these lyrics I don’t remember until I have to sing them on stage. But that one, yeah, it’s just so weird when you are a shy, private person and find yourself on the cover of magazines. I was kind of struggling emotionally, and it was hard to deal with. Also, dealing with relationships back then, not knowing what was real and what wasn’t.
AUK: Let’s get to your new record, “Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!” Whatever you would care to say about some of the songs. Start with ‘Spaceman In Tulsa.’
AD: I like that one. Well, like a lot of artists, I grew up feeling different from everybody else around me. It seemed like I felt things differently. I processed things differently. I felt kind of weird, and you wonder whether you’re going to have a place in life at all. And then I wrote a song, and it was like, oh, all this stuff that’s been sort of pent up is meant to go right here. It just made sense to me. That song is really about how lots of people grow up feeling weird and different from everybody else, or grow up in places where it’s not okay to be who they are. For a lot of us, art, in my case, rock and roll, gives us a place to be ourselves and to be humans and to have a life that means something.
AUK: Did you just pick a city at random? Tulsa.
AD: No, I had a friend who grew up in Oklahoma. He didn’t grow up in Tulsa. I knew that, as much as I really love people in Oklahoma, it was probably pretty hard for him growing up there. He is a very flamboyant, gay kid and brilliant. I was just thinking as one of the examples about him. There’s no buffer for what people throw at you when you don’t fit in. You can feel ostracized.
AUK: How about ‘Virginia Through the Rain?’ It appears to focus more on personal flaws, with each droplet of rain an issue to resolve.
AD: I was on a train going down to visit my sister, who lives outside of DC in Virginia, and it was pouring. And I thought of that line, I can barely see Virginia through the rain. I also knew a girl named Virginia, and I really liked the dual nature of that. I wanted to write a song about someone who’s not necessarily the greatest person. His desire is to be connected to people. He’s very dishonest, and it’s just part of what makes him, well … him, is that he is very desperate for connection. Because of that, he lies and lies and lies. The song is about someone who wasn’t necessarily ideal. Not that he’s a bad person. We’re all struggling, and we all put ourselves first a lot of the time. This character does it in a way that makes it probably very difficult to be close to him.
I thought it would be more interesting to write about someone like that than myself being wounded by someone else’s dishonesty. You know what I mean? In my songs, the protagonists are usually the ones fucking up, not the people around them. I just find it less interesting to say this is all your fault. It’s more interesting for it to be my fault. And in that case, he’s someone who knows he’s like that and wishes he was different but isn’t changing. I found that to be a very interesting character to write about.
AUK: Well, don’t we all sort of do that in a way, whether it’s expressed or just felt? Maybe I’m projecting.
AD: Aren’t we all? There are not a lot of songs about calling ourselves on it. You know what I mean? I find that I didn’t want to seem like I was glorifying it, but I also didn’t want to seem like I was demonizing it either. It’s a very human thing to fuck up in that way by not telling the truth to people who love you. It’s a very real, very human, very shitty, but very real thing. I wanted to write about a very flawed person.
AUK: You start the album with a bang: Loud guitars, distorted, almost punk rock style. ‘With Love from A to Z’ sounds like you’re expressing love for people you know, fans of the band. It would be surprising if that one wasn’t personal.
AD: That’s actually the last song I wrote for the record. Not the last song I finished, but the last one I wrote from scratch. I did some work on others after that. When I was writing the second half of the record, I listened to a friend’s record that I sang on, this Australian band, Gang of Youths. It was on their record “Angel in Real Time,” and it was so good. I had just sung on it right after I finished writing these new songs. And listening to it when it was finished, I just realized how much better it was than the stuff I’d written. They were really lacking this center, this heart. So, I went back to the drawing board on a bunch of those songs. Spaceman, Under the Aurora and Virginia were perfect. I thought ‘Boxcars,’ it was the first time I’d ever really rewritten stuff like that, where I had doubts, lost confidence in the songs and sat on them for a couple years.
And then I wrote ‘With Love from A to Z’ and I loved it. That made me realize, okay, I got to figure out what’s going on with all these other songs. That was what the impetus was for making this record right. But to me, A to Z is kind of an updating in some ways of ‘Round Here,’ both of which were a guy standing in the doorway of his house looking out at the world and trying to imagine how he was going to fit in when he went out into the world. But it was also a statement of the artist as a young man. This is where I am right now. This is a portrait of me in the present. In a lot of ways, A to Z is very much a portrait of where I am now or where I was then.
In the last few years, I’ve spent time with a lot of my friends who are also songwriters and have been really important to me. There’s a group of us who have been bouncing ideas off each other and sending each other our stuff when we’ve written it. The song talks about them as well and how that relationship has changed my life in many ways. It’s about the scope of things in my life that still involves walking out the front door, just like the guy ‘round here. Going across the world and coming back, the guy says, I will leave you a lot, but I won’t leave you alone. It’s not the same to walk out the door now as it was back then because I have something here that’s really important to me, as important in a lot of ways as my music, which was never the case before this. To me, music was everything and the only thing that was really at the center of my life. That’s not true anymore.
AUK: Let’s move on to ‘Angel of 14th Street.’ There’s a recurring line that recalls the old catch phrase for Motel 6 about we’ll leave the light on for you.
AD: When I wrote that song, it’s fantastical for sure, but I was also thinking about ostracized parts of our society, how groups get pushed off to the side, they’re not as important. They should be shipped out of here. It’s not okay to be gay. There’s a lot of different ways that go on in the world, but I think when I wrote Angels, I was really thinking about we’re a weird country in America. On the one hand, we’re on the forefront of the future idealistically, and we have been since the country was created. The idea of America is very forward-thinking in that not only does the majority rule, but the minority is also protected, and the rights of everyone matter. Because most times you have a revolution, you just kill everybody on the other side, where we have elections.
I was thinking of something the President said on route to his first election, about how it must feel to be a woman. On the one hand, it took us forever to get women to vote, but now they do. They have all this freedom. But in the history of our country, we’ve never elected a president who was a woman. My sister doesn’t know, for instance, that she could be the president because we’ve never had one.
AUK: It could be there hasn’t been the right candidate yet for a woman to be elected.
AD: That could be. I mean, we’ve reelected a lot of wrong candidates in the history of America. It’s been 250 years. There have been a lot of morons who became president. You know what I mean? I don’t know what makes a right or a wrong one, but there doesn’t seem to be any method. I feel there is a real callousness in our society towards women, like we know what’s best for you by the other half. I thought we were making progress around ten years ago, but it’s back, like attaching a lack of value to half of the population.
AUK: Okay, let’s go for one more, say, ‘Under the Aurora.’ I’m thinking the aurora borealis, that amazing display of lights. It represents a beacon of hope and belief in the world despite all the noise and uncertainty.
AD: Aurora was a weird one because I wrote all these songs except for A to Z in England on my friend’s farm. I was writing a sort of comic apocalypse song about life after the war in England, and I was trying to incorporate a lot of stuff that I was seeing in my day-to-day life there. The chorus was very catchy, but it didn’t mean much to me. When I got to the rewriting, that was the first thing I realized. I rewrote some of the verses and rearranged it a little bit, but I completely wrote a new chorus in the wake of everything that went on during the pandemic. If you lived in New York, a lot of people died here.
It was nothing the city did wrong; it just caught everyone by surprise. We’re a very populous international city, but there were freezer trucks in front of the hospitals because the morgues overflowed. That was a tragedy for a lot of people who were scared and angry about the way the pandemic was dealt with. I just felt like there was so much going on in the world, where did this sort of silly song about a comic post-apocalypse really fit in? That didn’t mean anything to me. I was looking for more meaning, and sort of wrote a song about trying to find meaning in writing songs in the midst of all these things that were going on. Now I love it. It’s one of my favorite songs on the record, and it was a very clever yet meaningless thing before, but now it really does mean something to me.
AUK: If you were to take a poll about which song identifies with Counting Crows, like Zevon’s ‘Werewolves of London,’ what do you think would be the result? Maybe new casual listeners who were too young when ‘Mr. Jones’ or “Round Here’ came out would say ‘Accidentally in Love,’ the one that was synced into the movie “Shrek 2.”
AD: I will tell you this: There’s only one song that I never get tired of, because with every song, there’s just nights where you don’t feel like playing it. So we don’t play it. But ‘A Long December,’ I never get tired of playing. It’s probably the only song that has appeared in every single show since we wrote it. I can’t think of another one. There have definitely been nights where ‘Rain King’ wasn’t in there. Definitely whole tours where ‘Mr. Jones’ wasn’t in there. There are tours where ‘Round Here’ alternates with ‘Sullivan Street,’ but ‘A Long December’ is there every night, come what may.
AUK: What is it about that song that is so appealing to you? It sounds melancholy but with an optimistic side. For you, is that wanting to feel positive and not negative about your life and that of the world?
AD: I don’t know. For one, there’s something that feels very perfect about it. Very gem-like in its craft, but I think it encapsulates in ways what all my songs are about – loss and hope, getting through difficulty and looking towards a future that might be hopefully better. You don’t know, but you hope it will be. Also, the ways in which you let parts of your life pass by without appreciating them. It’s just got so much of what my writing is about in that one song. And maybe because it is not as misunderstood as some of the other ones. I think people just get it on a cellular level. It’s become like a holiday standard. Every Christmas season, I see different bands covering it, which is special.
AUK: What has been the initial reaction to “Butter Miracle?” We’re just a few days from its release, but some people have heard it, the songs you rewrote, the additional ones. How do you feel about it?
AD: I’ve given a lot of thought. Several of the songs have to do with isolated groups of people who go through real trauma, thinking they can’t fit in. We should live and let live in America. I think the music expresses that. It takes you on a journey, one you haven’t been on before. I think it’s really unique and special.
Excellent summary of Adam’s journey which taps into the meaning behind his lyrics.