As the crow flies

Adam Duritz is a happy camper. Relaxing in his London hotel, the Counting Crows frontman sounds positively chipper, and with good reason. His band are in the middle of a sell-out tour. Their new single, ‘American Girls’, is getting acres of airplay and the album that spawned it, Hard Candy, is being universally praised as their finest since their debut, August And Everything After. And there’s the little matter of a Slane appearance to look forward to…

“It’s weird,” he says. “Things seem to be looking up, especially over in the UK. We were only going to do one small gig for press and it sold out in a half-hour. Then we added the Brixton Academy and that sold out in an hour, so we added one in Bristol and so on, and they all sold out. It’s on the radio: the BBC is playing it, and we’ve never been on the radio before.”

One would be hard-pressed to deny Duritz his moment of joy. Since ‘Mister Jones’ put the Crows on the musical map, they haven’t exactly been critics’ darlings outside America, but that hasn’t stopped the San Francisco collective becoming one of the best live bands in the world, constantly re-inventing their songs on stage, and recording three quality albums in the process, as well as the live double album, Across A Wire. He must be delighted that they changed their minds with Hard Candy, which was originally going to be a collection of cover versions.

“When you start an album, you normally haven’t played together in a while,” he recalls in that trademark West Coast drawl. “Plus, I don’t write on the road so you’re sort of struggling for new songs. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we just went in and started recording all these covers and while we’re doing them, we could be writing new material as well’. So you accomplish two things. One: you get your band used to playing with each other again before you go to make the record. Two: you can start recording without new material, and that way, if it takes a long time to write new material you can have a record to put out in the meantime. But the truth is we started coming up with new material before we ever even went in to do that.

“At that point I thought maybe we shouldn’t be doing this record. I wasn’t sure a covers album was going to be the best thing for our career at that moment, especially because we were going to be doing mostly obscure covers. With new material coming, we just started getting the bug of making a new record. When we were pretty much done with the (covers) record, we recorded twelve original songs in five days.”

It transpires that, rather than being released as an album, the covers are going to appear as B-sides and bonus tracks on the European and US versions of Hard Candy.

Meanwhile, it’s not surprising that the album is picking up such a positive response. It is probably the most radio-friendly Counting Crows album to date, a fact which Duritz acknowledges.

“Every song had to have a killer melody or it got thrown away,” he insists. “The other big thing was that we really wanted to try and finish songs. It’s not that we left songs unfinished in a bad way on other albums: we left them the way we wanted them to be and that may have been more of a raw thing. But on this album, we wanted to craft things. We were meticulous about that stuff: walls of harmony, detailed composition, strings, horns, not just pads either but actual parts. We really worked at it on this album.”

Lyrically, most of the new songs seem very confessional and very personal, as most of Adam Duritz’s songs undoubtedly are. Is it weird when he writes some of these very personal, poignant songs and then they go out into the public arena? Is it not like letting people look into your diary?

“That seems like kind of the idea,” he sighs. “It doesn’t seem weird to me because that seems like the point behind it. Every once in a while, I accidentally put something in that I shouldn’t have put in. But mostly, if I don’t want anyone to know it, I don’t write it in the song. I’m here trying to make myself look good,” he laughs.

Take a song like ‘Carriage’ though, which was written about an ex-girlfriend of Adam’s who was pregnant with his baby and then went through the trauma of a miscarriage.

“It was when I was writing that and ‘Richard Manuel’ [‘If I Could Give All My Love (Richard Manuel Is Dead)’ – song written about former member of The Band, Richard Manuel, who hung himself – JW] that I realised how much this album is about memory,” he explains, serious now. ”That happened seven years ago and ‘Richard Manuel’ was 15 years ago, so it was so strange for me to be writing about songs that are so much in the past. That is when it started to occur to me how much of this album is about memory, more than about things that are happening today. It’s about how you’re affected by things in your head, when you’re once removed from them actually happening. That song [‘Carriage’] is pretty ugly. It’s very dark.”

Duritz is in a good mood today though, and doesn’t want to be dragged down. He changes the subject quickly.

“What do you think of that Gemma Hayes record?” he asks me, back to his ebullient self. “I was watching the BBC the other day and they were flipping through this young songwriters thing and they played her song ‘Hanging Around’. We’ve got a song called ‘Hanging Around’ so I perked up, wondering if someone covered our song. Instead, this song came on and it was just fantastic. So I went around the corner the next day to Tower and bought it.

“It reminds me of when I was coming up out of the college radio scene and there were all these great bands in the early ’90s that played this really tuneful pop music but with distorted guitars and weird suspended chords, interesting dissonances. It reminds me of The Bangles crossed with Flaming Lips in a way. Her vocals sound like somewhere between Lisa Loeb and Suzanna Hoffs, but the songs are darker: they are really moving. I am really impressed by the record. I think the songs are great. I’m dying to see her play.”

Speaking of playing live there is the small matter of entertaining 80,000 Irish punters, when Counting Crows play Slane. Needless to say, Duritz is looking forward to that one immensely.

“It’s a very special gig for us, because we’re playing with Stereophonics and they are old friends of ours,” he enthuses. “Kelly actually opened the show for us in Brixton Academy the other night: it was a secret gig and the crowd went apeshit when I announced him.

“Also Tomas, our tour manager, is from Cork, and it has always been his dream to play Slane Castle. The last time we were there, we were getting drunk and Tomas ended up introducing me to Lord Henry. He said, ‘That guy over there, Lord Henry Mountcharles, I’m bringing you guys to play in his castle one day’. Tomas still isn’t satisfied though, because he wanted us to headline Slane. But I’ve been dying to play Slane Castle forever.”

Recorded history

adam casts a critical eye over counting crows’ back catalogue.

August And Everything After

“On August, I feel that we didn’t really know how to play together. We had only been a band for a few months. I feel that we were learning to play, so we played really quietly and we played in a circle. The main thing about that album was to learn to listen to each other. The big plus with that album is that it had great songs: the minus is that we weren’t particularly great at playing them. That album has aged the worst for me.

“I hadn’t listened to it in a long time. Recently, we were doing a photo session and the photographer informed me that she likes to play August And Everything After at some point in every photography session. We did this one set-up with just me and her and she played the whole album. It was 6:5, songs I liked against songs I didn’t like. It was just the performances. About four or five of the songs, I thought we do way better now: they seem callow, very young, and they didn’t plumb the depths of the song. Having gotten those songs so much better live, I knew that there was so much more in those songs than we ever got to on that record. That made me think that I really only half enjoy the record any more. Some of it’s great: ‘Mr Jones’ is killer, but ‘A Murder Of One’ I didn’t like.”

Recovering The Satellites

“With the second album, I felt like we were enthralled with stretching our boundaries. We were reaching out, trying all these new things, and we wanted to make it as raw as possible.

“That album is better than we play it live. I couldn’t believe how searing and raw and beautiful it is: the performances on that album are outrageously good. I think that is the album people are going to go back to later in our career and freak themselves out over, because I think a lot of people missed it in the first place. To me, I couldn’t believe how good that record was. In my head, it has always been one of my favourite records that we’ve done, just because of the circumstances of it, I really loved the scope and the breadth of it. Listening to it a couple of days ago, I was really confirmed in that. I love that record.”

This Desert Life

“The third album, I thought we were really trying to get into the studio and do quirky, weird shit. We were very interested in the first Sparklehorse record and the Cracker record, Golden Age, and we were listening to The Bends. We really wanted to get in on what you can do in the studio that you can’t do live in rehearsals. How can we write songs just based on fucking around with things in the studio?

“We made this really lovely, quirky album that I think is so great, but I think it probably wasn’t a good time to make that record. The world was settling into a more mainstream thing and we were settling into a really quirky thing. It didn’t match where people were right then. I listened to that as well the other day and I was really charmed by that album.

“We attacked that album with so much innocence: we felt free to do anything we wanted. We experimented: we did songs in the middle of the night. We did them in weird ways. There is a real sense of freedom to that album that I really like, which reminded me of the making of it in a really good way.”