More about: Counting Crows

It’s not often that Counting Crows release new music - the Butter Miracle EP is only their third collection of original songs in over 15 years -  so naturally we jumped at the chance to get Adam Duritz on the phone to chat about their ambitious new record, finding new ways of inspiring themselves and what they’ve learned from nearly three decades in the music industry.

“I think that one of the reasons I got excited about writing and recording again is because when I realized those songs [opener ‘Tall Grass’ and single ‘Elevator Boots’] flowed like that out of each other, it gave me an idea that I was excited about: to write a suite of music that all flowed like that.” Chatting to us over webcam from his home in New York, a clean-shaven Duritz, also shorn of the trademark dreadlocks he’d worn since Counting Crows started in 1991, is in a chatty mood as he tells us about the spark for the band’s first music since 2014’s fantastic Somewhere Under Wonderland LP. Written in late 2019 on a rented keyboard after jetting to London, shaving his head and decamping to a friend’s farm in the west English countryside, The Butter Miracle feels both understated at just four songs, and an ambitious step into new territory in terms of its composition.

“I don't know that I would have been excited about just writing 10 songs and putting it out,” Duritz explains. “That didn't really do much for me. I've enjoyed that many times in my life, but right then I just... I got really excited [composing The Butter Miracle] 'cause it was interesting and it was a challenge.” Clocking at 19 minutes of continuous music, The Butter Miracle’s four tracks flow into one another with an ease few composers could manage, while showcasing the full range of Counting Crows sound; ‘Tall Grass’ is a strained, slow burn lament, lead by Duritz’s dirge-like piano chords over a Casio click track. ‘Elevator Boots’ shows off the group’s upbeat folk-rock and knack for harmony, ‘Angel of 14th Street’ features a wild, wonderful trumpet solo before ‘Bobby and the Rat Kings’ brings it home with ‘Baba O’Reilly’-style power chords and glam guitars. 

While they might be best known for jangling three-minute pop songs such as breakout 1993 hit ‘Mr Jones’ and ‘Accidentally in Love’, their brilliant standalone song for the Shrek 2 soundtrack, from the first tour Duritz has been engaged in spinning out their performances with improvisations and extensions. The band finally captured those idiosyncrasies on record with ‘Palisades Park’, the meandering opener to Somewhere Under Wonderland. A musical shapeshifter taking in bandstand brass, country-rock and Broadway vocal accentuations (if not the genre’s wild high notes), Duritz steps out of his own head and into the spiked heels of Andy, a cross-dressing teen coming of age in early '70s. 

“I've always been interested in larger sorts of songs, whether it was you know, taking ‘Round Here’ or ‘Rain King’, or ‘Goodnight Elizabeth’ and extending them to 10 minutes by having all these improvisations and different things happen in the middle. Actually trying to compose something like that, which is what ‘Palisades Park’ is, I like the challenge of writing and performing things that are not your three-minute pop song. I love your three-minute pop song too but I have to admit I'm not as interested in that as I am in creating things that are a little more complex, a little more interesting, a little more of a challenge to perform and maybe more fun to perform. I love ‘Palisades Park’, I mean, I really do. It's one of my favorite things we've ever recorded. I'm so proud of it. It was hard [to record]. It's hard to still play onstage. I have to conduct the song in a lot of moments, you know, and that's really cool though. I think that this [new EP] is very related.” (‘Elevator Boots’ even flips a lyric from ‘Wonderland’ rocker ‘Elvis Went to Hollywood’. “Do you remember me? I don’t remember you,” becomes “I remember her, I don’t remember me.”

‘Palisades Park’ remains a remarkable achievement in a career full of classic songs, and is the highlight of the band’s recent concerts. That instrumental agility and playful character work opened a door for Duritz, having reached the end of the road with 2008’s painfully introspective Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings before taking a detour covering their favourite songs on the timeless Underwater Sunshine (2012). 

Once again writing in character, ‘Elevator Boots’ and ‘Bobby and the Rat Kings’ work as counterpoints telling the story of Bobby and his band starting out, grappling with fame and then finding peace in the EP’s final minutes. “They're about the role music has played in my life,” Duritz explains. “Whatever other difficulties I've had in life, from the first time someone put on a record when I was a really small child, music has been a refuge and a comfort and something that I loved and something I geeked out on,” Adam confesses. “‘Bobby and the Rat Kings’ is kind of about how music comes through your life as a fan, and I think that ‘Elevator Boots’ is the other side of my life, which has been about how music is when you're the one making it and you're the performer. It's like the two sides of the thing I've loved most in my whole life. Something I always loved and something I grew up to perform.”

Duritz is in full flow, clearly enjoying the chance to talk about a new songwriting paradigm that he’s found richly rewarding. “‘Elevator Boots’ is taking a look at that from the direction of the thrill of being a performer, and what it means to travel, to leave things behind, to leave people behind, and to leave a lot of yourself behind. But also the thrill at the prospect of another night with another gig in another town. The Alice character is more about the idea of people coming and going in and out of your life. The Bobby character is me really. You find people, you lose people, they fade away. But there's a gig, it's another show. That's the joint,” he says in summary. “There's another show, another night, another town, and that's always a thrill. That's always meaningful.”

If that romantic ideal of busting out of town onto the next show was the heartbeat of the new EP, Adam’s own experience of the music industry has provided a certain level of disillusion with the rigamarole of releasing records. “When I was younger all I wanted to do is put out records, that's like the hope of your whole life. It was very exciting. It's just…,” Duritz takes a moment to collect himself.

“Writing songs: very personal, very self contained. Me and the band making records: very personal. Very self contained. Me and the band. That's all it is, a producer, maybe an engineer, but it's all very self contained. There's no other people involved. There's no response, it's about making something beautiful and that you love. But releasing a record is about all this other stuff,” Duritz sighs. “It involves the entire world, involves a lot of people's opinions. It just involves a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with making a record or writing songs.It's been true for every record, that there's a big difference between the work you do to make a record and the work you do to put it out. I was a little bit tired of that runaround,” he admits. “I just found myself not really interested in doing it.”

The solution, then, was to find a new way of writing, a challenge to spark that old excitement to make an album. Aside from the aforementioned Palisades Park, last album Somewhere Under Wonderland was also notable for a shift in how Duritz wrote lyrics, putting confessionals to one side and playing with the rhythm and flow of his words in a way normally associated with hip-hop, a trick another poet-turned-rock star Alex Turner tried to great effect on Arctic Monkeys AM record. Take this Duritz verse from mandolin-led country tale ‘Cover Up the Sun’, “Sister Indecipherable is talking to a wall/ Back in New York City, she’s a queen/ Resurrect or genuflect/ She saves the ones she can’t protect/ And keeps the chapel pris- (if not Sis-) tine.”

On The Butter Miracle’s final piece ‘Bobby and the Rat Kings’, Duritz treats us to tongue-twisters like “Z tried to edit/ Reddit instead it said it had eaten her phone/ She goes from tinder to cinder/ 'Til she remembers she’s a flame of her own”, and “Some leather-wrapped Fender-strapped kid/With a pick-finger twitch/ He’s got a recipe for radio or rain/ I don’t know which.”

“I've been enjoying playing with the sounds of words and the way they spin up against each other, and yeah, that was a lot of fun on this one too”, Duritz says, smiling. Given the Crows’ made their name on emotionally tortured outpourings in their lyrics, does that mean he’s had to sacrifice some of that intensity to accommodate new idiosyncrasies? “Well, you kind of try and get both in there, but I do think some of the meaning comes from the way you're willing to play with sounds. It changes the tenor of the moment, maybe adds a little more humor to it. On [Wonderland cut] ‘Earthquake Driver’, the speed of the syllables: I had to learn to say those tongue twisters to sing them. I enjoyed not being so serious all the time on Somewhere Under Wonderland. Some of it is very serious and moving but also I enjoyed playing with words.”

“You know, I'm a talented writer and I can play with words in a number of different ways, both to evoke joy and sorrow and also just kind of some humour,” Durtiz asserts, with a confidence you might not always have associated with him. “Like the ‘O-bla-di Li-bi-do’ joke at the end of ‘Earthquake Driver’. I think I have enough ability now that I can do that, and I also think I used to worry a lot that if I wasn't really really serious, no one would take it seriously. And I think I don't care about that as much anymore, as long as I take it seriously. That sort of was liberating because it enabled me to do some things that were…” 

Duritz pauses and hops onto another train of thought. “I think it was Chris Carrabba [of Dashboard Confessional] who said it to me once. He's like, ‘You know I love all your songs but you're not sad all the time. You're not serious all the time. You're full of shit and you joke around a lot of the time and as much as I think all those records are a real look inside of you, this record [Somewhere Under Wonderland] is a little bit more of what it's like to actually know you and to just be there with you’” Duritz recalls fondly.

“Because it has humor and has like some stupid jokes,” he continues. “I think that was the real kind of point of liberation for me, to let other parts of myself come through as opposed to just the sorrowful thing and the serious thing.”

“'Cause the truth is, I am full of shit and I joke around about things and that's part of me too, and I'm glad I'm able to put it in some songs. I have a lot of joy in writing. I love that this is something I'm good at and spent my life doing it and I love that I get paid to write. ‘Z tried to edit/ Reddit instead it said it had eaten her phone’?! Yeah, that's kind of magnificent to me, you know. And I don't see why I shouldn't let myself enjoy that. I'm glad I'm finally letting myself do that.”

With the EP in the bag, Counting Crows have teased a second ‘suite’ (The Butter Miracle 2: The Buttering, if you will), and after a few years off the road are tentatively pencilling in some tour dates in the United States for the fall. After Adam’s West Country seclusion in 2019 (he’s yet to pick up the accent) and the pandemic of the past year, that means getting back out and about. “I'm having a harder time trying to wrap my head around going out every now and then. I haven't been able to [go out], like a couple times friends have come to town and I've been really excited about seeing them and going out and doing something. And then I just... don’t,” Duritz confesses. “I just can't seem to get myself to go out and do something. I guess I've got a little agoraphobic, maybe from staying indoors so long.”

But with a new opus to show off at the band’s concerts, there’s a desire to give The Butter Miracle it’s place in the spotlight alongside the old Counting Crows standards. “I would like to play it straight through. In the middle of the show we break down for acoustic sets all the time, it would be a great way to come out of an acoustic set to play ‘Tall Grass’ into ‘Elevator Boots’ into ‘Angel of 14th Street’, that would be a really good way to build up the show. And then into ‘Bobby and the Rat Kings’ and maybe from that into ‘Mr. Jones’. And then you know you keep going out. Yeah yeah, it seems like it could be really great to me,” says Duritz, almost to himself, convincing himself of the notion. “I like the idea of doing it that way.”

With the band hitting a new vein of creativity, toying with musical possibilities and lyrical sensibility, and with live music making its first steps back from the desolation of the past year, hopefully it won’t be too long til Counting Crows can take the trip over to the UK to share songs new and old. We’ll still come around.

The Butter Miracle EP arrives 21 May.

More about: Counting Crows