iProng interview: Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz

Adam Duritz is a man of many words, and not just in his lyrics. When our call gets dropped about seven minutes into our interview and he has to call me back, he’s still working his way through answering my first question. I’ve asked him if the concept for the new Counting Crows album Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings has been brewing in his head for the entire six years they’d gone without making one, and he responds by taking me on a tour through every album the band has ever made. He’s not avoiding answering the question, he’s just taking his time getting there.

He tells me how after their 1993 debut album August and Everything After sells millions of copies, no one wants him to work with Pixies producer Gil Norton for their second album (he does it anyway). He recalls how a backstage conversation with Paul McCartney (“the one time in my life I was not tongue-tied around a god”) indirectly inspires his approach to their fourth album, 2002′s Hard Candy. It’s during that era that he writes 1492, a song that doesn’t feel right for that particular record, but in 2006 he finds himself continuing to revisit the song as his manager is urging him to do a summer tour.

“I suddenly thought where my life had ended up, which was in the fucking dumper, and how I’d gotten there. And here’s this song about me disintegrating,” Adam tells me in reference to 1492. “And I thought, I know what kind of record I want to make, you know? I know what I want to do. There’s some pieces of music we had been working on that I had never written to. I suddenly got all these thoughts about it and I called my manager and said I’ll do the tour this summer but I want the whole band here in May. I called everyone. I called Gil and I said look, I want to do this. It needs to be you.”

Adam and the band reunite with Norton in June 2006 to begin work on what would become Saturday Nights, the pensive hard rocking six pack of songs that open the album. “Then we went on tour that summer and came back in the fall and basically went in the tank and we never went back to the record. And then by the end of the year I kind of hit bottom and realized I’d better get off of the floor. I called everyone right around January 1st and said we’ve got to get back in the studio.”

It turns out Norton is still available prior to beginning his work on the new Foo Fighters album, and a few weeks later Saturday Nights is complete. During the course of those sessions, Adam’s blueprint for the album evolves. As his life is changing, he begins to envision another record, a companion piece to Saturday Nights.

So at this point is there an epic-length double album in the making? Not exactly. “If we made them both as short records, like the way Beatles records were like thirty minutes long. If they were short records but they segued one into another, like a double record used to be. Not like a double record is now, where it’s like three hours of music.”


The idea behind Sunday Mornings is, as its title suggests, what comes next after it at all falls apart on Saturday Nights. Not an unplugged record by any means, but nonetheless a mostly gentle and quiet record (if largely electric). “It’s still folk music, or whatever you want to call it, it’s a different kind of rock and roll”, as he puts it. Sunday Mornings is going to have its own producer – but first he has to find the right guy.
Adam takes me through the details of his search. In the kind of scene in which you’d more likely picture a geek than a rock star, he’s got three windows open on his computer, hopping amongst iTunes, MySpace, and AllMusic.com, coming across a band in one and then learning more about the band in another. Whenever he finds an album that suits what he’s looking for, he looks up who produced it and then checks to see what else they’ve produced. He keeps coming across the same name: Brian Deck.

“I noticed when Iron and Wine went to make a record with a bunch of instruments instead of just a guitar, it was Brian who did it. When Modest Mouse went to make their first major label record and became this kind of much broader scope of the kind of music they were approaching, Brian did that. And like the Fruit Bats, there were all these different bands. And finally I just went to Brian on AllMusic.com and just searched him, and started looking through nothing but all the records he’d done.”

In something out of Steve Jobs’ wildest dreams, Adam proceeds to download about twenty albums that Deck has worked on from iTunes, and then maxes out his iTunes account by enabling it on four of his bandmates’ computers so they can take a listen. It’s agreed that this is the guy, and while Sunday Mornings is being developed, it also becomes clear that the hard rock of Saturday Nights and the quiet of Sunday Mornings will remain segregated on the album – “although that was very much fought against by everyone.”

Up to this point Adam’s been answering my questions before I even get a chance to ask them, so I’ve just been keeping quiet and letting him talk. But for the first time in several minutes I interrupt him by asking the question that has to be asked: who’s everyone?

“Industry people around us did not think it was a very good idea to have a Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings record,” Adam tells me, detailing how 1492, Los Angeles, and On a Tuesday in Amsterdam Long Ago would each have been cut from the record, all of which the powers that be deemed “either too ugly or too embarrassingly raw in Amsterdam’s case. They said really bad things about myself. They would like You Can’t Count on Me to have been You Can Count on Me, and maybe not have that big ugly electric guitar on it, because it could be a huge hit if it didn’t have that guitar. Well, it’s got that guitar to make it, cause it’s about being sucked into something ugly, and you have to get punched with the ugly, you know? They didn’t want the division of the records. Move the pretty stuff to the front. Let’s get Washington Square and Michelangelo up front. Definitely get 1492 off the record. Certainly don’t put it at the front of the record. ‘Son, you just can’t do that, you’re going to alienate your whole audience. You’re saying terrible things about yourself and you can’t do that.’ Well, fuck off!”


Having had advance access to the new album for about a week, I’ve already thrown any pretense of objectivity to the wind right at the beginning of the interview by fessing up and telling Adam that I think it’s some kind of masterpiece. In light of the revelation that the powers that be don’t approve of the way it’s structured, my assessment of the album suddenly seems a bit ironic. Industry folks are afraid the fan base won’t like it, and I’m a fan and I’m among the first to hear it, and I love it. But I can see where the industry folks are coming from. It’s not a record that should work by any textbook standard, or even by any previous Counting Crows standard.

While each of the first four Crows records has traveled to its own places, the one constant has been the mix of rockers and ballads. And on each of the four, that blend has been on a per-song basis. Time and Time Again needed Rain King to follow it. American Girls needed Good Time. So when I first hear about the segregated layout of Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, I’m all set to be skeptical. Is separating the ballads and rockers like so much lights and darks in the laundry actually going to service the art form, or is it merely an attempt at categorization? After all, most albums with such a structure are greatest hits packages, which are only segregated out after everyone involved realizes that a band’s catchiest hits usually come together to make a lousy album and they can’t figure out any other way to arrange it.

But then I hear the new album in full, and I “get it” the first time through. It takes me a few more listens to figure out why. After grabbing ahold of you and hitting you over the head with 1492, Saturday Nights hangs onto you for a full twenty-five minutes before finally letting go. If you’ve ever wondered what Counting Crows would sound like if they were a straight-ahead hard rock band, this is it. That having been said, the degree of rockingness throughout the first twenty-five minutes is not a constant. Once 1492 has swept you up like a tornado and Hanging Tree has kept you there suspended, Los Angeles is your four minutes of mid-tempo respite before you get swept back up again toward a climax that by the time you’re done listening to Ghosts will leave you out of breath.

Then Sunday Mornings kicks in, just as you’re gasping, and the opening notes of Washington Square come to you like fresh air. And because you’re still recuperating, the album stays quiet and pretty for quite awhile. Electric, full of instruments in large part, but still quiet and pretty. A few times I tried listening to just Saturday Nights and then moving on to something from another artist, but each time I found myself seeking out something along the lines of Sunday Mornings anyway. What initially appears to be an odd pairing of two disjointed albums turns out to be a foregone conclusion: of course one should flow into the other.

Adam wants to make it clear that the industry’s attempts to get him to rearrange the album don’t really amount to pressure, “because it doesn’t have any effect on us at all, other than being kind of frustrating and annoying. We’re not changing anything, you know what I mean? That’s not how we work, it’s not how we make our records.”

So if the established rock star is in a position to call the shots on the makeup of the album itself, what else will his label allow him to get away with in this new era in which some of the industry’s biggest stars have defected from their labels, presumably leaving execs at least a bit worried about losing the rest of their household names?

They start by letting him give away free MP3 downloads of two of the songs from the album, including the frowned-upon 1492. But it’s not some young turk who’s greenlighting the free downloads, it’s fifty-something year old Jimmy Iovine, the Chairman of the label. Adam characterizes Iovine’s mindset: “You’ve been here a long time, you’ve worked really hard, you guys work really hard as a band… take your shot. If it works we’re gonna all look like geniuses. If it doesn’t work we’ll try something else next time.”

So even before the album’s most middle of the road song, You Can’t Count on Me, gets sent to radio, the hardest rocker on the record and one of the quietest go up for free unrestricted download in what Adam terms a ‘digital forty-five.’ When I ask him why, his answer is simple: “because it’s smart.” Of course he’s got a little more to say on the matter:

“We are not well represented by one song, but this is a double album. I wanted, before you heard You Can’t Count on Me, I wanted you to get the album, a graph of it. There’s 1492 and there’s Michelangelo. And I wanted you to be able to carry them around in your pocket all day long. It’s like, look, radio will only play you a certain amount of times in a day. Hopefully they’ll play us a lot, that’d be great, you know? And they’ll sell a lot of copies of You Can’t Count On Me and a lot of copies of the record. But, you know, they’re only gonna play us so many times and you can only hear it when you’re at home or in your car.


“There’s a million blogs out there and you can send it to every single one of them and they will all take it and they will all put it up for free download. You can get it to billions of… there’s a whole world out there connected to the web, and it’s free to get it to them. Stop thinking of it as stealing. Sure it is, but it’s also a free pipeline. What you want to get out of radio, you can get it out of the internet. And you can get it better because they can put it in their iPod and then carry it around with them all day long and they can listen to it a thousand fucking times if they want to.

“Now that is way smarter. You don’t have to pay anybody, you’re not bribing anybody, and it’s not just four times a day. You’re not at their mercy. The fact is, if someone likes it, they can listen to it as many times as they want. And when they don’t want to listen to it, they can listen to something else so they don’t get sick of it. It’s not force-fed. I think the internet’s all about people making choices for themselves. I wanted to give them the opportunity to choose to listen to my music, and also to maybe come to understand this album a little better before they get this one song that’s supposed to represent who we are. Cause that never works with our band. Its hasn’t from the beginning. It just doesn’t work at all. That’s not who we are.

“I’m curious to see if we can sell a lot of albums on iTunes, cause you have the opportunity to buy one song at a time, but I’m hoping people will buy our album because I think it’s worth getting. And by introducing them to both songs… we were doing really well, I mean Ron Johnson wrote me an email and said “look where your fucking record is.” Three weeks before it’s available to be on sale, it was like at number nine, a week into pre-sale.

“And at that point you gotta remember, no press has come out. That means that all this underground stuff we’ve been doing on the internet for the last few months, putting up the streaming footage so people can make their own videos, putting 1492 and Michelangelo out there for free downloads, all that stuff, all the blogging, everything we’ve been doing virally using the internet to set it up for iTunes, you know? You used to give a forty-five to the radio and they’d have two songs and they could play it whenever they wanted, and we could all push our cassette players and record it off the radio. The only thing I’m doing differently is giving them a better copy of it and allowing you to play it whenever you want to play it, in a better machine than my cassette player was, you know? The iPod’s just a lot better machine.

“Well my thinking was, why not make the entire world my personal radio, you know? So I just turned every iPod into our radio station by giving them songs.”

At this point I’ve totally forgotten that I’m on the phone with a major label rock star, and I’m convinced I’m having a flashback to PodCamp NYC. After all, only indie musicians talk like this, the ones who run around begging for their songs to be played royalty-free on people’s podcasts, the ones who need every penny that comes in from their album sales just to make rent but who also understand that keeping it all locked up in a vault isn’t the best way to make album sales happen.

At this point I’m wondering whether Counting Crows would have been willing to split from their label if they hadn’t been allowed such freedom in crafting and promoting the album. So I point out to Adam that his mindset sounds an awful lot like that of an indie musician, and I ask him if he thinks the recent trend of famous artists like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails going indie is a sign of things to come.
Interestingly enough, Adam can recite every detail of Radiohead’s attempt to market their latest album as a “name your own price” download, from the percentage of downloaders who paid for it (thirty-two), to what they each paid (six dollars), to how much it works out to per album ($2.20). There’s no question he’s been watching closely. “If they hadn’t sold a single record, they’d still have had two million records out there, a lot of them in the hands of people who would never have listened to Radiohead otherwise. That means when Radiohead comes around on tour, a business they own a hundred percent of, some people are gonna buy Radiohead tickets that wouldn’t have bought them before. And if you see them, you come back. They’re very good live. So are we. That’s an advantage we have.”

Major label artists frequently stream significant portions of their new albums on their official website or MySpace page, but Adam doesn’t see that as a real solution. “Streaming annoys people. They don’t want to sit at their computer. It feels like you’re teasing them. What they like is to walk around with it. It feels like you’re showing them something but you don’t trust them to take it when you’re streaming for them. Give them a song or two, it isn’t the end of the world. It’s just two songs. I just think the web is the best thing that ever happened to music. There’s no way an invention that connects the entire world to each other for free can possibly be a bad thing. Too much communication has never been the problem in the world.”

If Adam Duritz is applying for the role of the great uniter of the digital era, the rock star who doesn’t bail on his label but doesn’t allow them to remain in the dark ages either, at this point he’s doing a pretty good job of nailing down my vote. But there’s only one problem. The battle between the music industry and internet users has been raging for nearly a decade now; if he’s got all the right answers to solve this, and it seems like he does, then where was he ten years ago when everything started going wrong?

“Part of the problem is, I think for a lot of us, is that it began with Napster. And Napster was such a clearly, not only stealing, but flipping everybody off while they were stealing. And the guy’s behavior, when somebody finally stood up, like when [Metallica Drummer Lars Ulrich] finally came out and said this is wrong, and it is. Because if you’re gonna say that tires are worth money, and carpets are worth money, and I don’t know, anything else you want to go buy, but that art is worth nothing? Well unfortunately that’s a mistake people have been making for thousands of years. It leads to Van Gogh never selling any paintings, it leads to a lot of stuff. But people have been making that mistake forever. And it’s a bad thing to say. And people say it because they’re so pissed off at the industry and how badly it’s run, and how they feel like they’re getting ripped off. And now they’re out there suing kids who are downloading, like that’s gonna help?

“Ten years ago we were all reeling from Napster because not only did they do it in everyone’s face, but when Lars stood up and said this is wrong, they made fun of him at the MTV awards. MTV went along with it and made fun of them, put [Napster founder Shawn Fanning] on as a hero. As a result of that, the record industry has been reeling ever since. Because that’s the way it started, they’ve been on the defensive ever since.”



So although Lars Ulrich started all this nonsense in the first place by suing Metallica’s own fans, and Adam acknowledges that suing the kids doesn’t accomplish anything, we still shouldn’t blame Lars? It seems immediately self-contradictory, but when you hear Adam explain it, it almost makes sense. Perhaps who’s to blame for the past decade doesn’t matter so much as how we move on.

“We’ve decided that our world is all made up of different kinds of borders. Lines on maps, lines in the sand, lines at the record stores. And we are just too intent on defending every border. We should be a lot more intent upon crossing them. That’s how you’re gonna survive in this business. The internet is free to every band. But on a record label, not right now – unless you can get them to work with you. But the other bands, the young bands, they have every opportunity in the world to get their music out there. I hope people will respect it enough to buy their music if they handle it the right way. I hope. If not, it’ll be hard for it to survive. My feeling is it’s really possible.”

If this represents the potential for a new beginning for the music industry, a quote in the official artist bio for the new album has me, leading up to the interview, wondering whether Counting Crows will be around to experience it. In the quote Adam says that he approached Saturday Nights as if it would be the band’s final record, and upon hearing the full album in its entirety, the pieces seemed to fit. There are a number of instances where this album revisits, expands upon, and perhaps even wraps up certain themes from the Crows’ earlier albums. The famous refrain “I don’t believe in anything” from their first hit, Mr. Jones, is repeated in the new song Sundays; the “I dream of Michelangelo when I’m lying in my bed” reference from Angels of the Silences gets an entire song devoted to it here; the words “Washington Square” appear on the cover of their first album and are also the title of a new song; and with just over a minute left in the last song of the new album there are a pair of exposed guitar notes that sound an awfully lot like the first two notes of Round Here, the first song of their first album.

But Crows fans can rest easy, as it turns out Adam has a whole different meaning behind his “last album” reference: “People were telling us to do something less ambitious, like a series of three-song records. There was sort of a sense out there in the world of resignation. My point I was making to the band or to whoever asked me the question at the time was, if this is the end of the record business, if this is our last record, we’re going out with a bang. We’re gonna make a fucking truly great record.


“I got up off the floor, so I’m here. It was my fault. I’ve been the one who wasn’t here all these years, the last couple years. But I’m here. And you’re all gonna be here or you’re gonna be gone. Not that it comes to that with this band. You know, we’ve been together for a long time with good reason. That kind of got misinterpreted as me saying this is our last album. More likely, in my opinion, Hard Candy had been our last album. I was done after that. But I mean at this point I was very determined to make something, to make something… ‘great’ is subjective. I wanted to make the make the record that I wanted to make.”


As the album begins to wind down, it becomes clear that Sunday Mornings isn’t about redeeming the sins of Saturday Nights. Rather, it’s about being okay with the fact that things have in fact fallen apart. “Things start and end in life, and it doesn’t mean you’re dead. But earlier it seems like it does. Everything in the first half of the album signifies a fall, you know, disintegration. But by the second half it’s just that there are ups and downs. Things hurt. And the second half of the album’s not about redemption. It’s really about how many different ways can you fail once you’re trying to get better. You decide to put your life back together, that doesn’t mean it gets together and you’re happy. It just means you decided to do something very difficult, like get your life back together. But most of what you’re gonna do after that is fail, cause you’re not any good at it. But it’s still what you need to do, you know? You need to live.”

The final song on the album, Come Around, is a surprisingly upbeat number considering its subject matter – that of getting dumped. But the idea here is that such problems don’t necessarily have to be problematic. “You’ve survived all this, and you’re still here, and the fans are still here, and the band is still here, you should probably just go out and play some rock and roll. So I guess by the end of it, it was like well, pain or not, happy or not, sad or not, let’s go play some rock and roll. It ain’t so bad. I’m here, so plug ‘em in – which is what we’re gonna go do.”

Learn more at CountingCrows.com

interview by Bill Palmer