Latest news with #Duritz
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘It's a Happy Time': Counting Crows Return With ‘The Complete Sweets!'
Back during the summer of 2021, Adam Duritz said he was in the process of 'tightening up' the songs for the follow-up to Counting Crows' then-new Butter Miracle, Suite One EP. 'When it's right, we'll get in and record them and put them out, and then play them (live), which is always the best part,' he told us. But Duritz didn't expect to take four years, almost to the day, for that to happen. More from Billboard PinkPantheress Drops 'Fancy That': Stream It Now It's No Secret: Gracie Abrams Hits Three Non-Consecutive Weeks at ARIA No. 1 Motörhead to Mark 50th Anniversary With Release of 'Lost' 1976 Album Butter Miracle, The Complete Suite Sweets! comes out Friday (May 9) as Counting Crows' eighth full-length studio album. It includes the four songs from Suite One, plus an additional five — the four Duritz was talking about during 2021, plus the opening 'With Love, From A-Z,' which came later. He and the band are certainly happy with the result, but Duritz acknowledges it did not come easily. 'I really thought I'd finished the (new songs),' Duritz, who'd written the material at the same friend's farm in England where he composed the Suite One songs, tells Billboard via Zoom. On the way back home to New York, he stopped in London to sing on Gang of Youth's 2022 album Angel in Realtime, which he calls 'one of my favorite things anyone's done in the last 10 years.' That, in turn, changed his perspective on what he thought was going to become Suite Two. 'I was suddenly thinking these songs I just finished aren't good enough,' Duritz acknowledges. 'They're missing some stuff.' He felt one, 'Virginia Through the Rain' was 'perfect,' but the others were lacking. 'I kind of had lost confidence in them,' Duritz notes, 'and I sat on them for a good two years. then I wrote 'With Love, From A-Z' here (in New York) and thought, 'That's great — now I have to figure out what to do with this, 'cause it needs to go on a record right away!' I've got to shit or get off the pot on these songs.' The solution, he found, was to gather some of his bandmates — multi-instrumentalist David Immergluck, bassist Millard Powers and drummer Jim Bogios — to his home New York and woodshed those songs that had been put aside. 'The problem was that my sort of ambition for what they should sound like outstripped my ability to actually play them on the piano,' Duritz says. 'I'm really good at arranging and singing, no doubt. I'm great at being in a band, but I'm not the player some of the other guys are, or that a lot of other songwriters are. 'So the guys came to the house and we went through them one by one and we loved them. They became great…and then we went into the studio only a few weeks later and knocked the record out in 11, 12 days — It's by far the fastest we've ever recorded (an album) — but it took forever to do it!,' he adds with a laugh. The Complete Sweets! new songs certainly demonstrate the merits of that extra effort. Taken as piece with the Suite One tracks they offer a Counting Crows amalgam, from the Band-like earthiness of 'With Love, From A-Z' and 'Virginia Through the Rain' to the sweeping, string-laden build of 'Under the Aurora,' the power pop of the single 'Spaceman in Tulsa' and the gritty guitar rock of 'Boxcars,' which Duritz says was particularly challenging until he brought the other players in. It is not a narrative, but The Complete Sweets! is certainly a conceptual whole. 'I wasn't trying to write a specific story,' Duritz notes. 'But (the songs) just sort of fit together for me. I just felt like this was a little world I was creating, and it felt very fertile.' The songs find him expressing himself mostly through characters — which he started in earnest on 2014's Somewhere Under Wonderland — than in the angsty first-person that was once Duritz's stock in trade. In particular, the protagonist of 'Spaceman in Tulsa' is clearly there in Suite One's 'Bobby and the Rat Kings,' which is the closing track on The Complete Sweets! and links the two groups of songs together. 'It's definitely thematically tied together; I think (the 'Spaceman') did end up in 'Bobby and the Rat Kings' for sure,' Duritz acknowledges. 'But I think even without that, that song would work even if there was no connection. But I wanted the connection to be there, 'cause I was vibing on that. I was digging writing about Bobby on this record. I think there are a lot of us like that in the arts who grew up wondering if we had a place in the world, wondering how we were going to fit in. We felt different from other people. We field weird. 'I think there's a world of people who work in our heads, and when we find that it's like we get to be the butterflies instead of just the caterpillars.' Counting Crows asserted its place in the world during the 90s, after Duritz and guitarist David Bryson began working as an acoustic duo in the San Francisco Bay Area. With its filled-out lineup, Counting Crows generated buzz by playing in Van Morrison stead's at his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction during January of 1993 — seven months before the release of its seven-times-platinum debut album, August and Everything After and its band-defining hits 'Mr. Jones,' 'Round Here' and 'Rain King.' Since then, Counting Crows has sold more than 20 million records worldwide and was nominated for an Academy Award for 'Accidentally in Love' from Shrek 2 in 2004. This year, meanwhile, marks the 20th for the current lineup, since 'new guy' Powers joined in 2005. 'I always wanted to be in a band and stay together,' says Duritz. And even though he's worked outside the band on a variety of projects — with the Wallflowers, Ryan Adams and other acts as well as films such as Josie and the Pussycats and The Locusts, and running a couple of record labels — Duritz contends that, 'I never wanted to be a solo artists. I have no interest in that shit. It's a hard thing to stay together as a band, and it's not surprising to me we've lost a couple people over 30 years, but right now it feels like we can go on forever — except I know that nothing works that way, y'know?' Nevertheless, Counting Crows is gearing up for its Complete Sweets Tour!, which kicks off June 10 in Nashville and runs through Aug. 23, with Gaslight Anthem supporting. And while forever seems like a big word, Duritz feels confident that the band will be with us for quite a while longer. 'I'm not tired of it at all,' he says. 'There were points where I was having more trouble with myself emotionally, and the band's stress was just too much. But our manager's great now. Our lawyer's great. I totally trust everybody. All that stress is gone. The band is so stable and great, and we're still killing it. 'So we're on our way again. Things feel good. Everyone seems to be in a really good place. It's a happy time — and,' he adds with another laugh, 'if even I can be happy, what's to stop everyone else from being happy, right?' Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Adam Duritz: ‘It's My World and I Love It'
'Connection is a hell of a thing…it's the life jacket we all need,' says Adam Duritz, frontman of Counting Crows, a band that's built their 30-year career through heartfelt live performances, emotional lyrics, and recurring, world-building themes in their songs. Ironic, then, that growing up, Duritz says he didn't know how to make connections with other people. 'When I was younger, I was so stuck inside myself,' he tells me from his New York City home. A bunch of movie posters plaster the wall behind him—Seven Samurai and Smokey and the Bandit among them. He's wearing a black Raspberries T-shirt, and sports a full black beard and a head full of dark brown hair, albeit thinner and shorter than the dreadlocks he was known for back in the '90s. More from Spin: 5 Albums I Can't Live Without: Paul Leary of Butthole Surfers Pearl Jam Welcome Peter Frampton For 'Black' In Nashville Lorde Lays Out Extensive 'Virgin' Tour Plans 'I had all this stuff I felt, and no way to express it or no way to connect with people because I didn't talk to people very well, and I didn't have any way to make connections. I felt so bound up inside myself.' It wasn't until later in life that he discovered he was suffering from depersonalization disorder, a condition that makes him feel emotionally detached from his surroundings, and even himself, which can last from minutes to sometimes months. Imagine feeling like you are seeing yourself from outside of your own body, or that everything around you is not real, and you don't know how to stop it; that's how Duritz feels a lot of the time. It can be a lonely existence Duritz's father served in the military during the Vietnam War and later became a doctor, which meant the family moved around a lot, only adding to his sense of isolation. 'It really separates you from the world in a lot of bad ways,' Duritz says. 'I was always a new kid. I didn't know people. I really had a lot of questions when I was younger, and I knew something was wrong with me. How am I going to take care of myself? How am I going to live a life? I didn't really know how any of this was going to work.' While he was in college, Duritz discovered, rather spontaneously, that he could write songs and play them. 'Good Morning, Little Sister' was the first song he ever wrote, about his younger sister who was going through a difficult time as a teenager. For the first time in his life, he says he had a sense of self, of who he was: He was a songwriter. 'I had a feeling there was all this stuff inside me that mattered, that was important, but it just was there, like a big ball of feeling,' he says. 'And then I write songs, and suddenly it's this way that connects me to the whole world, and all the things inside me that were stuck because the mental illness had a purpose.' Then, in 1993, two years after forming the Counting Crows with producer-guitarist David Bryson, the band—which by then consisted of Matt Malley on bass, drummer Steve Bowman, and on keyboards, Charlie Gillingham—exploded onto the music scene with its multi-platinum breakout album, August and Everything After. Then, in 1996, the group's sophomore album, Recovering the Satellites, debuted at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 album chart, going double platinum. The Counting Crows has released a number of live albums and compilations over the years, as well as five studio records, including its latest, Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!, the band's first in seven years. As Duritz describes it, the new record is 'so rock and roll.' Not to be confused with the band's 2021 EP, Butter Miracle: Suite One, Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets! is a sequel of sorts to its predecessor. Duritz tells me he wrote Suite One as a challenge to himself, to see if he could write one long-playing, continuous piece of music. The result was, well, a suite of four songs: 'The Tall Grass,' 'Elevator Boots,' 'Angel of 14th Street,' and 'Bobby and the Rat-Kings.' But it was also his answer to how people listen to music now. 'I don't know if anyone's listening to whole records,' says Duritz. 'People are digesting music in different ways anyway, so to me, it felt like since I was moved to challenge myself to make this 20-minute piece of music where the songs all flow together, it was just that, you know? But I really loved how it turned out. I thought well, it does make sense to make another half to this, though.' The Complete Sweets includes remixed versions of the songs on Suite One, along with five new songs, including the band's latest singles, 'Spaceman in Tulsa' and 'Under the Aurora.' But the road to get there wasn't so easy. Going back to his friend's farm in West England, where he wrote Suite One, Duritz composed the other half of the album and on his way home, he stopped in London to sing backing vocals on the Gang of Youths' album, Angel in Realtime. When the band sent him the finished product, he thought it was one of the best records he had heard in a long time. 'I was so blown away listening to it, and I had this realization that these songs on their record were significantly better than the stuff I'd written,' he says. 'The stuff lacked a sort of passion that these songs had and they were missing something, and I needed to go back to the drawing board.' So, that's what he did. And through the process of reworking his new songs, Duritz pushed himself like he'd never done before. 'I'd never really had this experience before of thinking I'd finished something and then realizing it wasn't good enough,' he tells me. 'They were a little more ambitious musically, to the point where I couldn't play them myself. Usually, I can tell a song is good because I can just play it for myself. But these were really difficult for me to play. I had them in my head, but I couldn't recreate them.' As much as he loved his new material, he lacked the confidence to share it with the rest of the band. So he sat on it for two years. Then a breakthrough happened. He wrote 'With Love, from A-Z.' 'I knew that was great. I loved that song,' he says. 'And it felt like, in a way, an updating of 'Round Here.' Whereas that's a real statement of a person and where they are in life, just as a kid getting ready to go out into the world and make something. And to me, 'With Love, from A-Z' was a statement of where I am today. And I really felt it worked and it was very powerful.' With a renewed sense of confidence, Duritz invited band members David Immerglück (guitar), Jim Bogios (drums), and Millard Powers (bass) to his house to play his new songs. Two weeks later, along with the rest of the group, Duritz ripped through the tracks in the studio in 11 days. Then, together with Chad Blake, the Counting Crows mixed the new songs, combining them with the remixed Suite One tracks, making a complete, nine-track LP. 'So the Suite [One] sounds different now than it did originally because we remade it to match the first half,' he says. 'The two pieces fit together really well. It was a different experience…' While the title of the album, Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!, has a bit of a nonsensical tone to it, the themes that run through it are quite serious and incredibly relevant to what's going on in America now. 'Boxcars,' for instance, is about the deportation of immigrants. 'Under the Aurora' was inspired by the murder of George Floyd during the pandemic. Other songs cover the objectification of women and trans kids in sports. 'A lot of the stuff on this record is about people in isolation and people on the outside looking in, finding ways to get through life. Sometimes it works out because we can pick up a guitar,' says Duritz, referring to himself. Duritz says that after more than 30 years together, he and the band are still fascinated with the process of making music, exploring new ways to perform older songs live, never replicating the same old playlists during their shows, and, as with the group's new album, finding new ways to write songs. 'We enjoy playing music,' he says. 'I love being in a band. I don't want to be a solo artist. I like the jazz of being in a band. I think we matter to each other. I've watched my friends fuck up great bands. I don't want to do that. There are a million ways to justify why things should fall apart. You just have to decide whether that's okay to let it happen.' The musical landscape is a lot different than when August and Everything After debuted, when the only option to hear it was to buy the album at the record store or borrow (or copy) it from a friend. Exposure meant getting a single played on the radio or creating a music video for MTV. The rise of streaming music, of course, has changed all of that; it's all the music you want, anytime you want, making it more difficult for artists to stay relevant, to build a fanbase, to connect with an audience. The Counting Crows are still passionate about being in a rock 'n roll band. 'I'm 30-some-odd years into a career here; a career that lasts five minutes for most people, if it even happens,' Duritz says. 'And we're still a band and we're still going on tour. And it's still cool. There are bands that are bigger and, it's not effortless, but it's still happening. That thing that saved me when I was a kid is still saving me now. It's my world, and I love it.' To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
Telegraph
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Counting Crows' Adam Duritz: ‘I've known Springsteen for decades and I still can't speak around him'
It's not often – if ever – that an American pop song name checks The Telegraph. But now, we can add at least one track to that list, thanks to alt-rock veterans Counting Crows. Their latest single, Under the Aurora, opens with an image of London commuters grasping this very newspaper. 'Almost the entirety of our new record was written in England, which is why there's that reference,' explains Adam Duritz, the band's lead singer and principal songwriter. He's talking to me from his home in New York, ahead of the release of Counting Crows' new album, Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets! Other nods to Britain are scattered across the album: one track references a 'shrinking English sky'; another sneaks in the British colloquialism of 'telly' for television. But while his recent stay in England clearly influenced the album, Duritz is a longtime Anglophile. 'I can't describe to you what a thrill it was that first time we went to London,' he says. 'As a kid, you see pictures of the Beatles coming to America and getting off the plane. Going to London for the first time was like that in reverse for me.' That first overseas tour came in the mid-1990s. Counting Crows had experienced a smash success with their debut album, August and Everything After. It seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, the breakout single, Mr. Jones, was about an aspiring singer who dreamed of fame. 'When everybody loves you / You can never be lonely,' Duritz sang. But he soon found that celebrity had its drawbacks. 'It was a really hard adjustment,' Duritz recalls. 'I didn't know how to be famous. When I got home at the end of touring, there were kids camped out on my lawn – I mean literally!' To escape, he started working a menial job – albeit in an exclusive location. 'I bartended at the Viper Room for a while,' he says. Founded by Johnny Depp and his 21 Jump Street co-star Sal Jenco, the club became the infamous epicentre of 1990s Hollywood culture. 'I was among friends and I was comfortable,' Duritz tells me of his time at the Viper Room. 'I have been a really shy person my whole life. I had trouble going up to people and saying 'Hi'. But when I got famous, I didn't have to go up to people anymore. They came up to me.' Duritz found he was more comfortable being approached in that contained world than out in public. 'The Viper Room gave me a home at a time when I needed one,' he remembered in a 2021 documentary about the club. 'I will treasure Johnny Depp for the rest of my life because of that. It changed my life. It was the making of me in some ways – the remaking of me.' Duritz became a key figure in the venue's celebrity scene, where he met – and dated – a string of A-list actresses. 'I met Jennifer Aniston there because a bunch of my friends lied to me and told me she had a crush on me,' Duritz recalled in the documentary. 'I honestly had no idea who she was. I had been on the road during all of Friends.' He also dated Aniston's Friends co-star, Courteney Cox, who appeared in the music video for the Counting Crows song A Long December. After their debut, the band continued to find success – their second album went to Number 1, and they also picked up an Oscar nomination for their song Accidentally in Love, from Shrek 2. But that first album and single still seemed to overshadow everything else. A recent video promoting their tour acknowledges this with good humour. Duritz lies on an analyst's couch, while a therapist (played by Brain Fallon from New Jersey rock band The Gaslight Anthem) enquires: 'None of your other records have sold as well as your first one. How does that make you feel?' Duritz may be able to poke fun at the diminishing returns of his band's output. But it's still a sore point. In fact, it's a key reason why Counting Crows haven't released a full-length album in 11 years. 'I really loved our last record,' Duritz says, referring to 2014's Somewhere Under Wonderland. 'Our label did everything to promote it. And I felt like it still barely made any impression on the general public. After that, I got discouraged about the idea of doing really good work and then having it just disappear.' As Duritz acknowledges, the seismic changes that reshaped the music industry have put bands from an earlier era at risk of being left behind. 'I got the feeling we didn't know how to put records out in this new world,' he admits. 'Radio doesn't really do it any more. There's no MTV. I love social media and its possibilities. But I missed the boat on Instagram and TikTok.' Throughout our conversation, Duritz defaults to this kind of self-criticism. Rock stars are supposed to ooze confidence. But he seems more focused on his shortcomings – particularly his mental health struggles with dissociative disorder and social anxiety. 'I can be a complete frozen nightmare with my heroes,' he tells me. 'I've known Bruce Springsteen for 35 years and I still have trouble forming sentences around him.' This lack of confidence is another reason for the 11-year gap between albums. 'I sat on these new songs for two-and-a-half years without even playing them for the band,' Duritz says. 'It was hard for me to know if they were good. I really started doubting them and I lost a lot of confidence.' One is tempted to draw an analogy with the Biblical Sampson, whose powers were bound up in his hair. After all, this new album will be the band's first since Duritz shaved off his trademark dreadlocks. It was a haircut so significant that it made headlines around the world. It also sparked a social media storm among Counting Crows fans. Most were supportive, though some took the opportunity to mock Duritz's departed dreads, which had reportedly been reinforced by extensions. 'Where will the crows nest?' one commenter quipped. But whether the hair was real or fake, the Old Testament analogy is apt. Duritz admits that his new look has had a major impact on his identity and self-esteem. 'Since I cut the dreads off I've become much less recognisable,' he says. 'I've found myself struggling to talk to people again.' At a recent party, he found himself next to actors Michael McKean and Bob Odenkirk. 'Neither of them knew who I was,' Duritz says. When a partygoer outed him as 'the singer from Counting Crows', McKean joked, 'Let me shake your hand again now I know you're famous.' 'It was funny,' Duritz acknowledges. 'But I'm having this weird experience where I'm suddenly not famous. I'm having to do that thing I had to do when I was a kid which is introduce myself to everybody. But I'm still paralysingly shy.' However, the party ended with a more affirmative encounter, when Duritz was recognised by Jack Antonoff, superstar producer for Taylor Swift and frontman of indie band Bleachers. 'He was probably the only person there who actually knew who I was,' Duritz says. 'I said to him, 'Ever since I shaved my dreads, nobody recognises me.' Then he was like, 'It was never the dreads, man. It was always you.' He was really nice.' Duritz could have used such positive reinforcement two-and-a-half years earlier. Because when he did finally share his new songs with the band, he found his doubts had been misplaced. 'It just felt great. We ended up going in a couple weeks later to make the record.' Now, everything will come full circle, as the band's upcoming tour culminates with a final show in London – like the Beatles in reverse again. 'It's still the coolest thing coming to London,' Duritz says. 'It's still a thrill.' Beyond that, he has hopes for the future of Counting Crows, albeit in his usual self-deprecating way. 'I suppose at some point it's going to run out,' he reflects. 'No one's going to want to see us or we'll get sick or someone will die. But as long as we can play, we will. Because why not? I mean, who gets to spend a whole life playing rock'n'roll? It's pretty rare.'
