Adam Duritz of Counting Crows: "As individuals, humans are magnificent people sometimes; as a group, we’ve always been shit"

Adam Duritz used to be one of the most instantly recognisable rock stars in the world; the tall white dude with the dreadlocks and goatee who sang ‘Mr Jones’. But no longer. As soon as the dreads went, Duritz seems to have become invisible.

Despite being a fan of Duritz and his band, Counting Crows, since their 1993 debut, August And Everything After and that ubiquitous single, your humble scribe walked past the 60-year-old singer no fewer than three times without recognising him in the lobby of the well-known Dublin hotel where he’d just spent the night.

He’s three weeks into promotional duty for the superb Butter Miracle: The Complete Sweets, their strongest album in at least a decade, and cannot wait to take the new songs on the road, including a date in Dublin’s 3Arena.

Duritz is relaxed and rejuvenated. He’s in a very happy and settled relationship with actor Zoe Mintz, and the critical response to Butter Miracle is the best they’ve received in ages. It’s Counting Crows’ first new album in 11 years, a period during which the singer admits to feeling “kinda discouraged”, after 2014’s Somewhere Under Wonderland “went down a hole and disappeared”.

He felt perhaps that the band “hadn’t made the adjustments necessary to put records out” in the new world of digital streaming: “You don’t want to do your best work of your life and throw it down a hole. And for me, especially with ‘Palisades Park’ on that record, I wanted people to know that song. If I write, I want to record, and so I didn’t write for a while.”

However, when spending time on a friend’s farm in the west of England, Duritz was bitten by the songwriting bug again.

“I got the urge to play and so I rented a keyboard, brought it down from London and I just started playing one day,” he recalls.

The first song to come out of this fertile period was ‘The Tall Grass’, currently this listener’s favourite song on the new album. It was, he says, “the key that unlocked the rest of the record, that unlocked me.”
Duritz explains that he suffers from a dissociative disorder, which effectively means that when he doesn’t play for a while, he pretty much forgets how to.

“I don’t really get better on piano because whenever I don’t play, I have to really kind of relearn how to play at all,” he says. “That’s why ‘Tall Grass’ is so rudimentary as a song, especially in the beginning. But what I love about it as a song, is that you can hear me barely being able to write the verses, melodically and musically. It’s really just this one set of chords going around the whole time, but the song’s second half really blooms melodically, and that was me opening up as a writer again.”

Duritz has always been a very confessional songwriter. In a 2001 interview for this publication, I asked him if those closest to him worried they’d end up in a song (“I don’t even change their names,” he laughed). On the opening track on Butter Miracle, ‘With Love, From A-Z’, he admits “These words are the essence of me”, which could be distilled as the core of Duritz’s songwriting.

“Before I wrote songs, I didn’t even know who I was,” he shrugs. “It has been the defining aspect of my life. It is who I am. And for a lot of my life, it was all I was. That’s not true anymore. I’m at a point in my life where I live with someone who is everything to me.

“So even now when I’m writing songs, ‘Sending Love, From A-Z’ is both a statement of ‘everything I am is for you’, because A to Z means everything, but also, I’m Adam, she’s Zoe. It’s a very romantic statement about... In a lot of ways, ‘A to Z’ is an updating of ‘Round Here’, which is about walking out the front door at a point in your life, looking out into the world and wondering how you’re going to get where you’re going.

“It’s a portrait of the artist at a moment, a state of the union. And I think in a lot of ways, ‘A to Z’ is too; it’s really a statement of where I am in the world right now. And a big part of that is Zoe.”

It’s also, he insists, about his friends, a group of songwriters that includes Shawn Barnard, Steven Kellogg, Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba and Gang Of Youths’ David Le’aupepe, who “bounce stuff off each other, send each other stuff”, and have been “a source of strength”.

Another highlight, and sure to be a new live favourite is lead single ‘Spaceman In Tulsa’; think Springsteen taking on Lou’s ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ and you’re in the right ballpark, a rollicking rock ‘n’ roll anthem for disaffected oddballs everywhere.

Duritz insists that while it is about “people who live on the outside of things, it’s also about the joy of finding something where it’s okay to be you. In this case, it’s about rock and roll, but also it’s art in any way, or whatever it is that gives you that place to be you.”

“I grew up weird,” Duritz laughs, “which is true of a lot of artists. You’re not the same as everybody around you. You don’t think the same. You don’t know why. Maybe you have mental health problems. Maybe it’s just that you’re different. That’s always been something that’s a part of my life.

“But also, I grew up in San Francisco, surrounded by a whole culture of people who were not welcome where they lived and found their way there at a time when it was really not cool to be gay, for instance.

And it’s a thing right now in our country, too, where everybody who’s not absolutely the centre is being marginalised even more.

“You have trans people, who are probably the least threatening group of people on earth, who are being portrayed as bullies. But also just women, half the population; you’re looking at a government, a legislature, and a president who obviously think you’re objects.

“These songs aren’t really political, but they’re about things I’ve been concerned about for a long time, and a lot of that stuff’s coming to the forefront, in a way, in the world nowadays, in our country especially.”

However, he insists that the US is still “a great place to live” and describes himself as “a very patriotic American". America, he professes, is “the original great idea, but there are people who fail to live up to that idea. That’s always been the case. We started off as the greatest idea in the world, with slavery included, so right off the bat they fucked it up. As individuals, humans are magnificent people sometimes; as a group, we’ve always been shit. The world is full of assholes.”

While describing the current incumbent in the White House as “one of the most appalling people on earth”, Duritz points out that however bad Trump is, “he didn’t fucking invade Canada or Greenland. What is the fucking deal with Putin? Like, why does he need to invade Ukraine, when his country has the biggest land mass in existence? It’s hard to make Trump look good in comparison, but Putin’s pulling that off.”

Another album standout, the closing ‘Bobby And The Rat Kings’ channels golden period Springsteen, even though he set out with The Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’ as a template.

“I was really thinking of Pete Townshend’s power chords,” he laughs. “I was so excited about it, but at the end of a song I was like, ‘I accidentally wrote a Springsteen song instead’. It’s much more like Springsteen than I probably wish I’d written, but I love it.”

• Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets is out now. Counting Crows play Dublin’s 3Arena on October 21.