Pushkin, Hey everyone, Today, Broken Records producer Leah Rose talks to Adam Duritz, the lead singer of Counting Crows. Adam Durretz is no stranger to the spotlight. Counting Crow's nineteen ninety three debut album, August and Everything After sold over
seven million copies in the US. Singles released from the album, including Mister Jones around Here, dominated radio and MTV at the time, but all the exposure wasn't great for the band, and according to Durret's it led critics to focus more on Durrett's star studed dating life than the band's music. They've continued to release music over the last three decades. In this month, Counting Crows put out their latest album
called Butter Miracle The Complete Suites. Today, we'll hear Adam Duritt's talk in depth with Lee Rose about his lifelong struggle with mental health and about how his disassociative disorder has him hacked his ability to connect with people off stage. This is Broken Record, real musicians, real conversations. If you want to see the full video of this conversation, visit YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast. Now Here's Leo Rose with Adam Durantz.
So how is it feeling being back in the promo world.
Oh, it's cool. I am excited. Yeah, I mean it's a I have a weird job, and it's not the kind of job that you expect to get to do for too long. Totally, you hope, but it doesn't usually work out this way. So I think it's pretty cool. I mean it's been thirty two years since my first promos, really, and I'm still here. Yeah. I think that's very cool. I've been a rock star for a long time and I really dig it. So every time we go back to do this stuff, yeah, I get a little thrill. Oh.
I mean, I don't know. It's like I'm still making records and people still want to talk to us about it. Yeah. We could be we could have self sabotized ourselves into the grave by now. We haven't and everyone could just be so bored that they don't want to talk to us. And that hasn't happened either. So yeah, it's good stuff. Yeah.
I was talking to Billy Corgan recently and he was saying that most bands, or most artists who get signed, it's expected that they have four years.
Oh really, that's the math on that.
Yeah, you know, it's already extremely difficult to get signed at all, but to have a career that spans three decades is pretty phenomenal.
I think he overestimated that at four years. Maybe you'll spend four years on the label. But I mean, I would think the greatest graveyard for bands is signed bands like that. You get in there and then they just sheled you or they you know, nothing happens. I don't know, it seems like anyways, it's not great to not have that happen to you totally. Although isn't it cool if he is related to Bill Burr?
But I mean to ask him about that because it feels like such a touchy subject. But they do look a lot alike.
Well, I think it's a touchy subject because he sprung it on them like without telling you.
I'm Bill Burr.
I'm Bill Burr. Yeah, yeah, which is weird. It's a weird thing to do.
It's very like Jerry Springer.
Yeah, and uh, I can understand why Bill Burr would have been a little annoyed about that. But yes, fucking Bill Burr, I'd like to be related to Bill Burr was talking about all kinds of shit. I think that would be great.
Yeah, I know, that's the craziest thing. It's so funny.
Yeah, I love that.
I love your connection to comedy too. I watched your uh you first have you only been on Rogan once?
Uh?
Yeah, okay, yeah, I watched that episode and I just thought it was cool. How just the connection you have sounds like you're friends with a lot of comedians, with Jeff Ross and some other guys.
Yeah, Jeff, I know Jeff Well. I was friends with Bob Sagett forever and Bob introduced me to Jeff and we became very close friends. We went and did a USO tour together. But also, for me, comedians are the that is the highest form of live performance to me, like they are they are the tightrope walkers. Like I love live performance. I love going to the theater. I
love bands. I admire anyone that can go up there and really do it in front of people for real, and nobody does it like comedians because they are more depending on audience to any of us, I don't care what happens in the audience. But but I mean, I just think comedians are incredible. I've been obsessed with that
my whole life. You know, growing up in San Francisco was a big comedy tea and I saw went to see comedy all the time as a kid, and you know, a young adult, and I've just always been obsessed with it, and you know, getting to know so many of these guys A huge fan of, like Alex Edelman and Microbiglia, guys who write these long form pieces that I think are so I've been obsessed with micro Biglia forever.
You said that you don't care about the audience's reaction, you're sort of just, you know, I imagine you're just doing your own thing for you. But correct me if I'm wrong about that. But does it seem like in your conversations they care about the audience. Are they also sort of just in their own experience?
Well, it's much more symbiotic, like when you're a community. I just shouldn't say I really don't care. It's not that. But I could play with a dead, silent audience. When the audience is really responsive, it's the most it's the greatest in the world. But if they're not, we could still play just as good as show. And in fact, you can't be too affected by it because the truth is, all you can really see is the first few rows,
So everything after that. Let's say the first three rows are sleeping, but there's ten thousand people behind them, So you can't like decide to suck that night because you know, as a musician, you've got to be able to just play no matter what the audience is doing, it doesn't matter.
But for a comedian, you need the response because the laps are the you know, the arc that the yes, it's part of the arc of the performance, and we're not dependent on that, so they have to ride that in a way that is I think terrifying, you know, you know, like I've done some like with Jeff and Bob.
They both used to have me come play piano and we would banter yes you know, and it's incredibly satisfying get laughs, but terrifying because you don't you know, may not you know, And having done a comedy tour with Jeff, like where we were going to USO bases where it's like and we were going to launch stool and like the hospitals really where that where the first places people were transported and these these particular hospitals dealt with a lot of PTSD uh and a lot of like really
traumatic shit. And it was a lot of the people, the doctors and the patients who were dealing with severe trauma. Wow, you know. And it would be like Colin Kane would do a set as comedian, Sarah Tiana would do a set as a comedian. The whole thing's hosted by Stewie Stone, and then I come on, and then Jeff and Robert Klein and so it's like funny, funny, funny death March, you know, Like, because I'm not a very good piano player, the only things I could play were like the most
Maudlin status County Cross Hunt. Oh, but it was you know, I had to kind of like be fun too. I don't know, it was really challenging and cool. Yeah.
Yeah, Wow, that must have been such an incredible experience an experience. Yeah, I've heard you say that the place that you're most comfortable is on stage in front of an audience or playing with a band. When did you first realize that and what was that realization like? For you?
It was more about being uncomfortable in the rest of my life generally, you know, and then finding that there's this thing I could do that made a place for me in the world. You know that, Like I had real concerns when I was younger with how I was going to take care of myself. You know, I knew that I was dealing with some pretty severe mental illness, even if I didn't know what it was then, and I didn't know how I was going to make that
transition to being an adult. You know, It's one thing when you got to go to class every day, however difficult it is, But when you have to just make a life for yourself and you have all this handicap going on, all this different cult tea, you know, I didn't know how that was going to work. And then I found this thing I do that makes it all possible. I mean, I think it was that writing songs gave me a way to process life, and it also was
a way that other people were drawn to. I don't think I was comfortable on stage right away or anything like that. In fact, I know I was very uncomfortable on stage right away at the beginning. It took a long time, but I think it's some people. I think that comment really came out of someone asking me if I ever had stage fright, and I said no, man, Yes, I have rest of the day fright, you know, like
like the stage is fine. I don't think I actually said like I'm more comfortable on stage, but it came from somebody asking me, though, do you ever get stage fright? And I was like, oh no, no, no, stage is fine. Stage is great. You know. It's like it's the rest of life that I have always struggled with. Stage is like I know what I'm supposed to do up there. I'm gonna improvise and you know, but I know there's
like a map. I even have a set list. It tells me what's coming next, you know, like, and I am free to explore and expand on everything in that list of things. Not that it's easy or anything, but it's it's it's comfortable. I know what to do there. It's not it's not like walking into a party full of people and I have no idea what to say to people. But I do know what to do when
I walk on stage, you know. And I'm not that I'm never nervous or anything, but it's such a I'm so much more comfortable there than I am in the rest of life that there's like no comparison. So stage fright is not much of a problem anymore. I definitely had it at times at first, you know.
Yeah, yeah, I can see why.
My first few gigs I lost. The first three gigs I played in my first real band as an adult, I completely lost my voice that day of the show. I woke up with no voice, no idea why it happened. I had to chew I had to bring ginger root on stage, cut it up and chew it and swallow it during the show because it was the only thing that got my voice back. And it just happened for like three gigs right at the beginning of my career. That's a lot.
And then it stopped, by the way, at the time, like three gigs is a lot.
That's it was and out of nowhere, and especially when they're your first gigs. Yes, you know, I'd played gigs as a kid in a band, like when I was thirteen. But now I'm like in my mid twenties and I've got a band and we're playing my songs and I go to sing and no, I forget go to sing. I wake up that day with no voice, and I go through the whole day. I can't talk, I can't
make it's the weirdest thing. It happened for three gigs and then it stopped, you know, so I know, so I I didn't feel like I was afraid, But that's some kind of weird psychosomatic reaction, you know. Yeah.
Was that something you've talked to your parents about when you were growing up, about feeling uncomfortable in any of like the mental illness you were experiencing. Were you open with your parents about that not?
Early on, I just don't think I recognized it. I just thought that's what life was like, and it was weird, and I was awkward, and we moved around a lot early on, so I didn't know any It wasn't like everybody else in my class who knew everybody. They'd known each other since kindergarten. I had usually just gotten there, you know. That was true in first grade, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade were all new cities, you know,
and then seventh grade was a new school. So you know, it was a lot of experiences where I'd only known anybody for one or two years. So I just chalked it up to being shy, you know. It wasn't until I started having some more sort of hallucinatory experiences in the latter parts of high school that I realized this isn't supposed to happen, This is not that. This is weird and scary and kind of psychedelic and not cool.
And then I went to some doctor and talk to my parents and yeah, but I was probably a junior in high school when that happened.
Wow.
Yeah, so it was started then with really you know, the more disturbing parts of it. Now I can look back on and see, Okay, that was happening to me in first grade. I can see what it was. The weirdness and the difficulty and being inside my own head, all the things that make up a dissociative disorder. I could see them now. Yeah, right back in first grade, you know. But I didn't. I didn't know that then.
You know, you're not really thinking about that stuff. You just think you're not popular, you know.
Yeah.
Have you are there any ways in which you apply the like you were talking about being on stage? You have a set list, so you have sort of a map of what you're going to do. Have you applied that to other parts of your life outside of performing, like as a way to live, as a way to sort of like write yourself.
I make a lot of lists for things, but you know it's not you know, but everybody makes grocery lists.
I don't know, Like, are you so much benefits from having like a schedule, Like is that feel?
No?
I don't like that. I prefer to have open space and then make things in the schedule. But uh, but you know what I do do, Like, uh, I've always cooked since I was a kid, and like during the pandemic, I really started cooking again a lot because we were here. And one of the things I do do is I do a lot of research. When I want to find something I want to cook, I'll read a lot about it first, and then i'll like, you know, make the recipe from several other recipes often and I'll read it
over a lot, you know, before I make it too. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And the same way when we were doing the podcast, I would spend like a lot of research time researching
all the stuff I want to talk about. When we had the Underwater Sunshine podcast talking about the music, because if we're going to do like a four part you know, like a four hour, five hour series on punk music, then I really need to have my notes and have it together which is how I started cooking again because when we couldn't do the podcast over the pandemic, I needed something to do with all that time, so I started cooking. Yeah, so I do do things like that,
Like I'm not as comfortable just winging it totally. I mean I will wing it still, but it's I put a lot of preparation into the winging it. You know, I'll make my own recipe, but I'll put a lot of preparation into that recipe before I do it. Does that have.
Any sort of overlap with the way that you write songs?
No, not really at all. That's very that is wing I mean I do that a lot off the top of my head, and it's very inspiration based. I mean it's a lot of craft that goes into it too, But you really get in a groove with feeling stuff and then finding ways to expressing words and music those things you're feeling.
Does it build over time with experience or is that is it more? Does the craft get to where it's at from studying?
Well, you push yourself into the writing. You push yourself to find the ways to say things that aren't the obvious ways, the ways that are you so you look for the details in the feeling you want to express, you know, like saying I really like her or I love her or I love you isn't particularly meaningful. I mean a lot of people have said it. What does I love her tell you about me? Not much, you know, and not much about the situation, and not much about
the relationship or anything. But if you say and all at once, I looked across a crowded room to see the way that light attaches to a girl, Well, now you've got this picture of someone in a room looking at someone and all those details. That communicates a lot of feeling, yeah, and also paints a picture that's very vivid of light hitting someone across a hospital room. You know, But you don't necessarily that line doesn't just pop up
out of nowhere. You know, you have to think about you want to express this thing, So you think about the room you're in or the room you were in, and you think about the details, and how can I conjure this feeling, which is I liked her, yeah, but in a way that it's not just I liked her, because that doesn't really give anybody anything, you know. And then the craft is like disciplining yourself to do that.
I read a book by Steven Sonheim once and he mentioned that he always keeps a rhyming dictionary with him, and I was like, why would you do that? That's so hack, you know, and I consider him as good a songwriter that has ever lived, you know, And he said, well, it's just a tool. Why wouldn't you have a tool that gave you a bunch of ideas Because it just gives you a bunch of words that you might want
to use. And one of those words, even the one that you don't use, might cause an image to pop up in your head that you do want to use later on, you know. And so I just thought, oh, it's weird. I'll get a rhyming dictionary and I keep them around now and they're really useful. And sometimes I'll just make lists of words at rhyme and then it'll inspire something else later in the song or right there. You know that there are a whole lot of different
ways to apply craft. Sometimes you can feel like it should just be this feeling you get and that inspiration and that emotion that is really important. You want the writing to be like infused with feeling and inspiration. But you know, you can't always expect it to just happen off the top of your head. I've written whole songs off the top of my head, just jamming with the band and I'm singing to Mike, And what's gone on four track around here was written almost entirely off the
top of my head. I just got the tape later and looked at it and it was all there. But you also sometimes you sit down and you work on it. This record, I wrote the first half the record on my friend's farm, and I went back there a year later and wrote the rest of it. And on the way home, I stopped in London because my friends in the band Gang of Youths were making a record and I had already sung on it once, but they had scrapped the record and they were re recording it and
I needed to go sing on it again. So I stopped there and sang on a bunch of stuff. And then when I got home a little while after I got home, David Leo Pepe, the singer, sent me the record finished and it was so good. And then listening to it, I thought, you know, I didn't hit this bar on the stuff. I just wrote those songs aren't good enough. And this is never happening for my attack career. I've never second guessed a song like this. When I'm done,
they're done. If they're not good enough, I usually throw them out. You know. It was clear to me that I had kind of misjudged. I thought that Virginia through the Rain was perfect, but.
It's such a good song, eat aful song.
But the rest of them, like Spaceman in Tulsa, it had too many sections, It went through too many permutations. I needed to. I went back to the drawing board and I really took that song and tuned it up and tightened it up. The song that became Under the Aurora. It wasn't a very good chorus. I kept all the verses in a slightly different order, but I wrote an entire new chorus for it, which is now now the song is called under the Aurora. The other chorus wasn't
good enough. Box Cars. It was too hard for me to play, and I hadn't finished it. I had all the ideas in my head, but not the song. So I went back and reworked all that stuff and then sat on it. Because I think the act of realizing they weren't good enough. Really shook my confidence in them, and so they sat there for two years. It's why there was such a chunk of time between Sweet One and the Sweet Tooth, because I just I don't think
I even sent them to the band. I didn't feel good about them, even after I'd reworked them and I thought they were great. I had a lot of doubts and I was a little embarrassed. And finally I wrote with Love for Me to Z, which is the one song I wrote here at home, and I loved that, and I looked at the other songs and I was like,
I got to figure this out. And I called up Millard and Jim are bass player and drummer, and immera our guitar player, and I said, I need everybody to come to my house, like in the next for a week. Just come in the next few weeks. We need to set some time. I got a demo of these songs. I got to play them with you guys, because I can't tell I felt like I'd written a bunch of stuff that was a stretch for me to write and
also passed my ability to play. I'm not a good enough player to play these songs well enough to judge them, and I needed the band here to play them, especially box Cars, which was so much a guitar song in my head the whole time, and I really couldn't even finish it until I had the guys here. And as soon as we started playing, we were like, oh, I love this song. Okay, Yeah, Spaceman is great, A to Z is great, box Cars okay, now it sounds great. That riff is great, you know, and Aurora Okay, it's
not just long, it's gonna be great. You know, this is these are really cool. We got so excited we wanted to go in the studio right away. We went in like three weeks later, in like eleven days, we recorded the whole thing. Wow, And it went really quickly from that point on, but uh, it got delayed by two years. Yeah.
Is that a feeling for you if you're going through like a crisis of confidence before that, when everything works out and you're with the band and you you crack the code you make everything work, is that just like, oh my god, thank god, it's it's not gone. I haven't lost it where.
You never happened to me before? Yeah, I don't know, but I lost it. But I just I had certainly lost confidence for most of my career. When I'm writing, I know it's good, and that's why otherwise I don't even finish it. You know, I know when a song is right, and I don't really I write most things in one sitting, you know, I don't really rework over months and months. This happened a little bit with the songs on Someone Under Wonderland because they were so different
from anything I'd written before. But this was different. This was like I had had to rework the songs. They needed work, and then they got They got great, but I didn't know it. And then when we started playing them, I was like, oh, this is great. Okay, thank god, Yeah, this is fucking We were all so excited that we did it all about four or five days and then we were in the studio two or three weeks later, like recording it.
So cool.
Yeah, it went really fast. I mean they you know, part of them was that they were like like box cars. It had its genesis in a way during the pandemic, because all of a sudden, there were these two years where I couldn't play, and at one point this riff kind of got in my head that went Corona a virus, Corona a virus, Corona a virus. No, no, no. It was like this metal riff that I was, like that earworm that got in my head, and I was running around the house singing it for like months at a
time and driving my girlfriend crazy. And then when I worked, I mean, I never thought I'd make anything out of it because it was a joke. I thought the riff was awesome, but the song Coronavirus probably wasn't going to be, you know. And then when I was writing what became box Cars, you know, I had that chorus that mom and dad and a couple of kids, you know, and I had the verse music in this chorus, and one day I was like, oh man, I wonder if that
riff would work here, you know. And so that this riff that I never expected to see the light of day under any circumstances because it was kind of a joke in my head became like one of the best guitarists I've ever written, you know, Like right here leading off that song, it's blistering. I'm always tempted to sing Coronavirus overrit.
But you should. So you said, maybe this is a metal riff. Have songs ever come to you that are in just a completely different genre, like an EDM song, like a hip hop like anything? Like has something ever come to you and you're like.
Oh, well, I mean in that, Like my abilities to play piano are pretty limited, and so often the idea I have in my head sounds nothing like what it sounds like when I play it. Like mostly I try and get off the piano as soon as possible. I want to teach it to the band and then get it away from what it started as you know, like
Boxcars is a perfect example. It didn't sound very good on piano, but it was never supposed to be on piano, Like I often hear guitar but play piano, so I hummet to the guys and are all kind of There are songs that are meant to be piano songs the way I play them, and some of those songs I end up playing on the records, like A Long December or good Night La color Blind. I played Missus Potter's Lullaby. But often it's really not like what I've got going on is not where I want the song to go,
you know, Like mister Jones is a guitar song. But I wrote that on piano, but it was never supposed to be on pian you know, like when you wrote.
That, did it sound different? So if you're playing that on if you're playing Mister Jones, for example, on piano, how did that sound when you were singing it to the band? Is it the same melody?
I don't know. The melody was probably the same. Yeah, I mean, for the most part, the melodies are often the same. It's just the feel of the song all often have to describe to them. Like you know, hanging around was a piano song is always supposed to be done to a drum loop, you know what I mean? And yeah, that that drum loop was always going to be really important.
Have you always been a romantic person, like even when you were younger, before you started writing music.
I don't know what's like a I mean, you.
Seem very romantic. I mean, just the line that you just said about seeing a woman across the room and the light hitting her, like, that's very romantic.
Yeah, yeah, I mean that line is supposed to be. I mean that's sort of that's the point of that line.
Do you feel like as a little kid, like you had feelings like that, like were you.
Well, you know, when you're dissociative, you spend a lot of time pretty far back in your own head, and that can be pretty isolating. And I think connection is something that you really lack and that you really want, but it seems like such a long way from you to other people, and so I think that there's a yearning that goes with that for connection and closeness. That's a big part of my writing and a big part of me probably. I don't know if I would describe
that as romantic. I mean, although that, you know, romance is certainly a part of you know, making connections, but it was I think music has always been about reaching out for me to other stuff, you know, and the connection is been really important, and the music provided me with a way of connecting with people that I didn't necessarily have otherwise.
We'll be back with more from Adam Durretz after the break.
Do you ever think about what your career would be like had The Counting Crows not blown up with the first two albums, especially the first album like out the Gate, like you guys were huge, If that would have happened on like in the middle of your career. Do you ever think about how things might have been different?
Well, it seemed like that's what was happening. Like, I mean, we were out for a while as like we were like a college radio band for a while there. Even when we played on Saturday Night Live and mister Jones was kind of a radio hit already, the record wasn't even in the top two hundred. I mean, we weren't really blowing up at all, And that was kind of what we thought. I mean, everybody nobody really thought we were like this instant hit band like Nirvana was right then.
You know, who were our label mates? You know that we had a three record deal. The talk was, you know, you hoped you maybe sl one hundred thousand records on that first record, and you you know, you got a chance to build a career. The model was probably like Ram who spent five records on indie label. You know, that's kind of what we thought was going to happen, Yeah, or what we not what we thought. That's kind of
what we hoped was going to happen. But we played round here on Saturday Night Live and our career blew up. It was really that. I mean, the record jumped forty spots a week for five weeks and landed us at number two for the next couple of years. But it hadn't been before that we'd been out. It had been out for three or four months. We were touring, we were having things were going pretty well. I mean, mister Jones was doing okay on the radio, MTV played a
little bit one hundred and twenty minutes. It all seemed pretty good, and then it just went through the stratosphere, you know. Yeah, But I mean it would have been cool in some ways because the backlash was pretty severe after after the first album, you know. Yeah, Satellites at the time was pretty disregarded. I mean, I think people really love it now and it's a really respected record in December, has become like a Christmas standard almost for people.
But at the time, I was so excited about that record. I thought it was incredible. It was a real departure from August and we were really growing as a band, you know. But it was completely dismissed at the time. I mean, We've got some good reviews, but there was also a lot of people who were just really really sick of us. You know, do you.
Follow that same arc with other artists that come out and blow up like someone like Drake, Like the backlash is inevitable if you get so big.
Well, yeah, there took a long time to happen with Drake, I mean, and there were people who didn't like Drake at the beginning too. It's very but you know, it's it was more like what happened to you like Atlantis, where it was just you get one album and you're done. You know, like after that, nobody's interested because they're so tired of you. I think that happens a lot to bands that are too on their first album. I really tried to shut down that record after Round Here. I
told them I would no longer make any videos. We were done, no more singles, no more videos. And then the rest of the songs went up and down the charts anyways without us doing that. What happened was there did I had refused to do any more singles and any more videos, And then I forgot that I had given DGC this demo track for their Rarities record, like a year and a half before that. I had given them Eindstein on the Beach, and because we never played
on recording Einstein for August and everything after. I thought it was a clever song, but not a great song. I had no interest in putting it on our record, and I completely forgot about it. Did you Se had asked me early on you have anything we can put on this Rarities record. I was like, yeah, take this thing.
I'm not using it. And then when I told them no singles, because the next single would have been Ranking, which is what we always thought was the big single off the record, Mister Jones was like a humble h introductory track that was catchy, and round Here was a real statement of purpose that was going to define the band.
And then we thought rain King will be the hit, which because these used to do that back in you put out introductory tracks, you know, and and I refused to put out Ranking after round Here was so big and the record was so big, I was like, no, no, no more. We need to put this down so we can have a career. And then and then they released the Rarities album and put I said on the beach to radio. So I was worried that Ranking was too pop, and what ended up coming out was way more pop
than rain King. It was this demo I sat on the beach which was and that went straight to number one, like and then after that, every song on the record went up the radio charts on their own for a while. One at a time. It seemed like almost every song on the record was getting played on the radio over the next two or three years, so there was no controlling it after that. It just is I might as well have just put out ranking because it would have been probably better for us and not. You know, but
after a while, you can't blame people. Your radio stations will play it to death because they get their advertising dollars from playing popular things. So if you're too popular, it's not a surprise that people are sick of you at a certain point, because it's like they have no choice. When it was radio and not Spotify, you had no choice what you heard.
Yeah, So did you have a mentor at that point, someone in the music industry who you could talk strategy with, or you could just sort of try and figure out the best way to approach all of this.
No, we had really good managers. It's hard to find anyone who doesn't want to chase success though, Like it's hard to tell someone no, we're not putting out any more singles because our album's doing too well, and have anyone think you're anything but out of your fucking mind. Yeah, you know what I mean. I mean, because they want to hit while the iron is hot. They want to make the money right now, and they are not as concerned our managers were. But your record company is not
concerned with your career. They're concerned with selling records, and you know, so it was really hard to tell people, no, I don't want to do anymore. I didn't get a lot of positive responses from that, right, but I I was sure it was the right thing to do. And I was right, you know, because we got backlash, But you know what happens. It's hard to complain too much about any success. It's hard enough to have that, you know.
I mean, I was very very happy with our career anyways, and I just was so excited about the next record and making Satellites, And it was kind of a rude awakening to have it come out and get such a you know, the backlash to hit it. We hadn't had much, We barely had any bad reviews before that.
Does it make you salty when people change their mind about albums collectively, Like if when something first comes out, people are kind of like, ah, these guys are overexposed. But then ten or fifteen years later it's like, oh, I love this album. Does that piss you? I mean, how do you like? Does that?
Pa? Like?
I'm glad at all the sort of re examination of recovering Satellites, because I always thought it was a great record. It was annoying that it was. It wasn't just Satellites. People were so sick of us that for ten years at that point we didn't get People were more reviewing who I dated than or who they thought I dated than they were reviewing our concerts.
Yeah.
I mean that lasted from like ninety six when we were courted, when we released Satellites, all the way up through the first really good reviews we ever got again were ten years later when we were released Saturday Nights and Sunday mornings. You know, it was all through Satellites,
this desert life and hard candy. Like was hard to buy a good review, and it was hard to buy a good concert review even There was just a lot of smack talk, a lot of really yea dish is in random notes, in jokes about us in Rolling Stone and random notes and concert reviews about girls they thought I dated, some of whom I've never met in my wife, you know, And there was a lot of that for
like ten years. It was a bummer because I thought we did great work, Like I think that Recovering the Satellites and This Desert Life and Hard Candy are great records, and now people go back to them and talk about all these songs they love. But in that ten year period from like ninety six to two thousand and seven, there were like no good reviews.
How do things ultimately turn around?
I don't know, but it turned around during Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. It turned around, like yeah, I remember. One thing I remember is that Rolling Stone came. It reminded me because Brian Hyatt's going to actually interview me for this record for Rolling Stone, and he wrote a piece about us, I think, during Saturday nights and Sunday mornings, and it was the first piece anyone had written on
us in Rolling Stone since August and everything after. There had been like a few live reviews and we had gotten mentioned in random notes, but there had never been an article in ten years. I don't think, And so I remember, I just remember that it happened. At that point, I was like, WHOA. I think the Internet had changed a lot, and there was a lot of a lot of bands had come up that were hugely influenced by
us and talked about it quite vocally. A lot of punk bands and a lot of emo bands were really influenced by Counting Crows, you know, like Dashboard Confessional. This Coarraba was very vocal in talking about how much he loved our band and how influenced he was. He covered Angel of the Silences, the guys in Panic at Disco would cover around here, and you know, they talked about it. There was a lot of indie bands who came up
talking about Counting Crows. There was a tribute album made that was all punk bands, Wow bands like Between the Buried and Me, you know, so like and by the Internet. It had really expanded by that time, so there was also a lot of public locations on the Internet like Absolute Punk and uh. I just remember a lot of reading a lot about us in those magazines as the bands with a whole generation of bands came up that loved our band, yeah and were very vocal talking about it.
And it kind of came from the bottom up. It wasn't like Entertainment Weekly or Rolling Stone. It was absolute punk net. Yeah, but also a lot of internet indie rock. There were there were znes that were online got It, that came up and they they talked about us a lot. The first really good reviews I started reading happened on online and in indie magazines.
Sounds like it was just sort of like a changing of the guard, like a new generation of people coming in. Yeah, discovery.
But also I think it was that there there had been that the music media industry. The media for music industry was very gate kept in the years before that. You had radio and you had uh, you know, Spin, Rolling Stone, whatever, few magazines and Entertainment Weekly and people that wrote about music. But then all of a sudden you had thousands of yeah, you know, and like now you have podcasts. You know. Before suddenly there was all these people that weren't like they didn't they didn't come
up with that attitude. They were just music fans who started their own magazines or their own podcasts or their own you know, fanzines online, and suddenly they they thought about things very differently. They just I just think there had been a real old guard kind of media industry that was suddenly expanded into you know, yeah, like you guys, you know, like podcasts didn't exist back then. So you have all these people who have their opinions. They don't
come from like five people. They didn't come right from, you know, like a journalist who worked at one of four magazines who wrote music reviews. There used to be you know, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, people, and a couple other you know what I mean. That was it, And now there's a whole mega media industry that comes from everywhere else. You know, it's it's everybody.
Every man and every woman has their own soapbox now yeah, yeah, and their own outlet, so that that gatekeeper is not there anymore.
Yeah, that's awesome. I thought it was really awesome. I heard you. I don't know where it was, but I heard that you were a women's study major in college.
Yeah. I was for the first few years. I was an accident, you know.
I was that like the easy, the easy major to get into.
No, it was really hard. It was. It was the opposite. It was by far the hardest series of courses I've ever taken in in my life.
Where'd you go to college?
The first couple of years at Davis and then at Berkeley.
Oh sweet, I went to Berklyn too.
So it was I had. I was brought up in very much like a women's lib household. My mother was an early member of NOW in the early seventies, you know, like we went to NOW meetings, you know, and NOW sell librations in Houston when we lived in Houston during that week when Billy Jean King was playing Bobby Riggs and we had that first issue of Miss magazine that came out of was it in Life magazine? The pull out with Glorious Stein, And you know, I was brought
up in that very much. And I but I had a lot of budding heads with my mom as a kid. And she had left to go to medical school when I was like fifteen, so she was away a lot of that time. And when I was applying to college or I just got into college, I remember having a big argument with her one day about something. She called me a chauvinist about it, and I was like, fuck you,
I'm not a Schouvenis. And I went upstairs and I was filling out my course things, and I I think I picked this my sixth choice, Social History of American Women in the Family. I wasn't going to get it, and I was like, see, I'm not shown I'm taking women's studies courses, so fuck you, you know. And then I went up for orientation week and I spent the entire time getting stoned and drunk and didn't get into some of my other classes and never bothered to try and
switch the courses. So I ended up in Social History of American Women in the Family, which I had never intended to take. I will say this on my pot. I don't think I was ever a chauvinist, but I was totally full of shit proving it to my mom by that course. But I ended up in the course, and it was incredible. It was like two hundred women and four guys in the class, you know, And I had probably more of a background in that stuff than any of the other guys, because I literally had grown
up in the movement. But I didn't know all the stuff. I hadn't read the literature, you know. You read The Feminine Mystique by Betty for Dan and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and you know, I was I mean, it's a whole half of our society that is, you know, flopped especially. I mean it was different, somewhat better than but you know, it's still Reagan time, so that the promise of the era and the early seventies hadn't really
come about. In the early eighties. When I was in college, it was just so good. It was really hard. We had to read an enormous amount, we had to write an enormous amount, and I basically, I mean it was bullshit me taking it in the first place. But I took every single course offered. I only stopped being a Women' studies major because I realized I was writing songs, and I became an English major. I was getting straight a's in my English classes, and I realized it was just
too easy. I took that my freshman year fall term, I took women's studies class. I took a women in poetry class. I read Carolyn Foschet's poetry, which is hugely and I got the first RAM record and those things, and I wrote my first song. I love all those things together because they very much informed. My sister was sixteen and at home, my mom was off at medical school. Sixteen is a hard time to be a girl, and she was struggling with it, especially with your mother out
of town. And my first song was written about, like, you know, the difficulty she was having. It was very informed, it was very informed by like everything I was reading and thinking about, and you know, I was just But once I started writing songs, I started writing every day. It's all I did was write songs. And I realized that I couldn't do that really at Davis. I'm not I can write, but there I couldn't start a band. The bands that were all cover bands, they played at
frat parties or anything I really wanted to do. I needed to go to Berkeley and I also needed to go there for the English to become an English major, to learn to really write.
I thought, did you graduate?
I did not turn in my thesis. I'm missing one paper.
Oh man, come on.
I was writing my thesis on HD Hill to do Little, the the poet who was an expatriate living in London during the Blitz. She had the poem called the Walls Do Not Fall, and it was an epic poem. I was writing my thesis on that and it just wasn't very good at all. I knew it wasn't very good. The more I wrote songs, the harder it was for me to write essays. It's a very different style of writing.
Like one comes from this wealth of feeling and then you try and find ways to hone it down into a craft, and the other one comes from a bunch of thought processes and an idea, and then you support the arguments in an essay and they're kind of backwards versions of each other. And the more I became really like I spent all day writing songs for two or three years there, the harder it was to write essays.
I just couldn't think that way very well anymore. And like to this day, I don't write songs with ideas, Like I don't have an idea for a song and then write it really, I mean, not like a theme.
I might have a line starts with a line usually.
Yeah, but I don't have like an idea like whenever I try and do that right thematically, it's terrible. Ever since I started writing songs, I can't write that way, and I was really struggling with it. At that point I had this I had was all done except for you know, as an English major, Brookeley, you needed to write a thesis and it just wasn't very good. And so I went to run professor, and I said, look, I need an extension on this. I'm gonna have taken
incomplete because it's I just this. I'm not a turn this in. It's not very good. You know, it's probably I probably would have passed. I'm sure it was a sea.
That's a paper, but it wasn't fine.
It was a weird way to sum up your college experience by getting a C, you know, or something like that. And so she said, look, just you know, you need to just try and do it right away. Because people if they get it done in the first semester after, they tend to get it done. If they don't, they tend to not get it done. So I understand, just get it done, and I never did.
So were your parents upset with you?
No? I mean, I don't know. I mean not now. I mean, I mean, look, I wanted to learn to be a writer, and I did. I mean, and I owe it all to Berkeley and Davis. But they were great. I mean they taught me to be a writer, and I am. And many of my thesis I've written since then have sold briskly, you know, Like I mean, I feel like I got everything out of them in a really good way. And I really It's come up before about honorary degrees from them and stuff, and I like to.
Say, I owe you an honorary degree, but.
I don't really want it. It came up and I sort of said no because I feel like it's not respectful. I don't know, I really respect my time there. Yeah, but I didn't graduate. I didn't turn in my thesis, and so I don't really think I should get a degree.
I wonder if you can still turn it in.
I don't know, but I'm not going to. I mean, I really, I really it worked. I really I respect college and I got everything out of college, like say, most English mixtures, don't, you know what I mean, Like I don't know how it works out for them, but not like it worked out for me, Like it's been. I have the utmost respect for everything I got out of Berkeley, and I have me too, But you know, I feel fine without the degree. It worked out great, you know, like I'm the very rare English major who
actually is a professional writer, you know, and very successful. Yeah, and I got it all from them.
After one last break, were back with the rest of Lea Rose and Adam Durretz.
Are you a short story reader?
Not anymore? Really? I used to a long time ago.
What do you read now?
Oh, I read a lot of crap now. I used to read a lot of history and a lot of fiction, and I mostly just read sci fi and stuff now because I mostly use my reading on the treadmill. Oh, I work out. I read on the treadmill, and I.
Work out, like do you run or walk and read both and read a book?
Yeah, Well, I use my I use my kindle. I mostly just read sci fi when I'm reading books. Now I don't really. That was another problem I had. I started to have more problems in the latter part of my forties. I had a lot of trouble reading some of the dissociative stuff fucked with my ability to focus that way, and so I didn't read anything at all for a number of years, really, And then I got back into it on the treadmill. And now I read a ton none of which is you knowature, great literature.
But I read all I do. I read all the time now, constantly, And then I get on the treadmill and I come up again, read more and get on the treadmill and read, and yeah.
Nice. It seems I could be hard to run and read, but.
Yeah, I think it is. But it works for me somehow. You know a few years ago when Bob when Sagitt died, Yeah, my girlfriend came to me and said, that was really scary. I wish you would be a little healthier, you getting older, and I wish you would I would just feel better. Yeah, And I was like, you know, and after years of not taking that shit seriously, I started getting on the treadmill every day, and for like three or four years now, I've been every day and going to the gym. And
but the book, the reading really helped it. Like I found that it really worked for me. But I can't think too much about what I'm reading. I just I just want to plot. Yeah.
Well, whatever works, I mean, whatever gets you on the treadmill and keeps you on there is a good thing.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean I read books about music sometimes. I read like I read Joe Boyd's book White Bicycles on it here. It's a fantastic book about that.
Oh I haven't heard of that.
He was the producer who produced a parrot work convention in Nick Drake, a lot of different stuff, Richard and Linda Thompson and a lot a lot of different and he wrote this great book about life and the music, kind of in the English folks. Even though he's an American. He's actually the sound guy. Did you see a complete unknown?
I did not?
Okay, Well, he's he's the sound guy at at Newport who refuses to turn down. That was actually Joe Boyd. They don't identify him in the film, but I know they do in the credits, and it's him.
Oh, very cool.
Yeah.
I'm waiting for it to come on streaming so I don't have.
To hear it's so good. I hate, hate, hate movies about music. I hate they're always such bullshit and they're always like, oh, he he's this what he's terrible with people? Unlet's show you know it's so good. I was prepared to hate it, and it's just so fucking good. Wow, it is so great. I don't I can't believe it is. I still can't believe it's that good a movie, and it is. I've seen it twice now, Wow, two movies
I've seen recently that blew my mind? Were that and becoming led Zeppelin the documentary see.
That either it's actually playing it at the near me. I want to go see it in a theater.
It should go. It's so good and they're both good for the same reason. They both play full songs. The movie does too. The movie like actually plays songs like real performances that are great.
But is it shall Amy singing?
Yeah, fucking bizarre that it's any good. Yeah, him and a girl Monica Barbara who plays Joe Bias. Yeah, they're both so good, and they're so good together. Ed Norton as Pete Seeger is it's you've never seen Ed Norton in a role like this, and he's fucking great. The guy that plays Woody Guthrie Scoop McNairy, who does the almost he's a mute at that point in his life for the most part because he's been so sick and so it's mostly with his eyes. He's it's just such
a good movie. You gotta see it. I'm those two movies for music fans are like, Wow, Like what a lush treat. Both those movies are. They're so they give so much.
Wow.
They don't think of you as having no attention span, Yeah, which is a way I think a lot of movies about music think you have the attention span of a four year old. Yeah, you know, and these ones do not treat you like that, and they're really good. I tell you, I fucking hate movies about music.
Do you like docs though? Music docs?
Oh? Yeah? Some docs more yeah, but very few. But so many docs are just like so they're there bench a lot of people who make documentaries. There benchmark for how to make great documentary is behind the music. Yeah, that's okay, it should not be. That shouldn't. But this, like that Depinely movie, it's fucking great. It's benchmark is closer to get.
Back, Get Back with incredible.
Yeah, and so is this. You're You're gonna blow your mind when you see it. Like there are at least four maybe five full song performance is in that movie.
That's awesome, Like full songs, like aren't they incredible?
They're so good? Like did you come.
Away with like any new takes on Zeppelin after seeing it?
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of idea. I mean, I'm a fan, but I mean I hadn't watched you know, the song remains the same as not the Greatest concert movie. And I had seen that and been like, you know, but I have a lot of Zeppelin bootlegs, so I know how good they were, but I had never seen this footage like this, where like, holy shit, the first song. My girlfriend is not a huge zeppein fan or anything.
She went to the movie with us and they got through playing the first song, which is I don't know if it was Heartbreaker or a Whole Lot of Love whatever. The first thing in the documentary is on some Dutch TV show or something. I don't know what it was, but it was over and she turned to me and she's like, holy shit, they're great. What a fucking band. And I was like, I know, unbelievable. One of the songs is days It Confused, ten minutes long. They played the whole fucking thing.
Wow.
And the footage they get all this great oudhood footage they got great, Like they don't have footage with John Bonham,
but they have a great interview with him. It's a really long interview and they play it throughout the movie over stuff, and there's scenes of the other guys in the band sitting watching footage with the director while he plays this bonhom interview and they're they're really moved by seeing him and it's just fucking It's only about the first the time from when they're kids leading up to the second record, but it is sublime for a music fan, it's like the real deal.
Yeah, I love that when you see a doc and it sort of gives you a whole new perspective on a band that's that legendary. That's that's why I love Get Back because it was like I saw the Beatles in a whole different way. I understood them in a way that I you know, there's such an institution. It's hard to have new feelings or revelations about the Beatles.
You've heard every song so many times that you know every last inflection, and so it doesn't give much to you because listening to a Beatles song is often more like remembering than hearing. Yes, you know, because you already have a memory of every inflection in the song. So to see them, yes, sitting around in a room, to see how close they all are and how they fight, but how good friends they are, how loving Paul and
John at each other. Yeah, but how loving John is with Yoko, and how loving Paul Is with Yoko that like all these legends of all the wedding heads and everything, all the bitterness, you realize that some of that is just like a bad day.
Yeah, you know, to see George's yearning, like I want to contribute more than I'm allowed to. My voice isn't valued, like you see all of this, and Ringo just kind of like hanging back.
And but how he is, how every time they start was a bizarre song idea. Ringo has the perfect fucking beat. He's just there. I don't know, you know, if you're a musician or not, but like, one of the hardest things about being in a band is if you have a drummer, it is so hard to work on new materials.
Don't have a drummer who is good at that that particular skill of keeping the beat but not getting in the way as a drummer, and therefore stalling new material because you don't know what to play yet and everything you're doing is fucking it up. Ringo is there every time with something original and cool and like they're writing and he's supporting and the songs take off because he's so good and so easy, I know. But when he comes in it's like like get back itself. Who would
to think to go? You would think do get back? But he's like dun who thinks to do like a fucking marching beat like that? But he does. And it's so good. It's the Epple movies like that because you really get to see them play and they're really good.
Yeah, and they're so good. Robert Plant is just like incredible. I mean all of them are incredible.
It's blistering stuff, like it's crazy good.
Oh that's awesome. Are you speaking of a fellow English major? Are you a big Paul Simon fan?
Oh? Yeah, Like I mean, to me, what's your favorite album? Hearts and Bones? It's it's to me it's the one of the best written albums I've ever heard in my life. I mean, there's Grace fans great.
All his albums are great.
Hearts and Bones. I don't really love the first song. It's called Allergies and it's Al Daimiola playing guitar on it. But everything after that is the best. The songwriting on that record is Yeah, you should listen to it. Man. Hearts and Bones is and he's made a lot of great records and written a lot of great songs. I go back to that record all the time because the depth of the writing on it, it's just peerless to me. Yeah, I hear that documentary about him is so good. Everyone's
told me that it's really really good. Oh, I had it came out like a year ago or two years ago. Here, it's amazing. Why did you ask just.
Because Paul Simon is a I know maybe Simon and Garfunkle were both English majors. And also you mentioned Graceland, and I love Graceland, and I also feel like Graceland is very much like a Berkeley album, Like I don't know, has a Berkeley vibe to me?
I get that. I love that record, I think, But I he's got so many That first record, the Paul Simon record that has Mother and Child Reunion on it. Oh, that's an incredible record. Yeah, I mean yeah, he's yeah, so good. He's a peerless songwriter to me, like as good as it comes. But that record Hearts and Bones is very underappreciated to me, I think because the first song is not a great song, but everything else is. I mean I I studied that a lot, Like, yeah,
that in Graceland, I really studied a lot. There was a great box set when they put Graceland out. They had this like a spiral binder in it that had a bunch of stuff that songwriting. He also talked about like rhyming and how he would work, and he would make lists of words that rhyme to even ideas for later in the song too. I remember really thinking about that as I read. I think that came out as
well as the Sondheim book. When I was working on the songs for Somewhere Under Wonderland and I was trying to write in a whole new way for myself, less just autobiographical plots, more about how I feel, but with other characters, as opposed to trying to make everything about my life. Could I could? I realized I could write how I felt without making it a plot line from
my life, you know. And so I wrote songs like Pallisades Park and you know, And I really studied that Graceland lyric book and all the stuff, all the scribbling he does in the margins, with all the different rhymes, and really thinking about how to like how to brainstorm ideas for writing. I don't know that's a great record, I say, Hearts and Bones, because I it's not as innovative as Graceland by any stretch of the imagination, but the pure songwriting on it is just maybe the strongest
group of songs anyways. It's just I just think it's incredible, awesome.
Yeah, has it been satisfying seeing so many people connect with your music and hearing you know, over the past three decades people come up to you and tell you how much they've connected to your songs and what they mean to them.
I think it's more me connecting with them. For me, that does happen what you're talking about, but I always feel really awkward. Yeah, I think it's more about like the feeling of me connecting with everybody, like when I'm writing, when I'm on stage, me connecting with the band, Like it's more about, yes, me connecting with them than them
connecting with me. For me, it works both ways, though, you know, Like the fact that I can talk about myself and that does connect me to other people is really cool that it's something that is so personal to me can become personal to everybody. But that's like, but I'm still working from the it's personal to me perspective because inevitably, other people's connections to me, aren't. They're their connections,
you know what I mean. They're in their heads and they're connecting with a picture of me, not actually with me. But it allows me to actually connect with people in a way that feels important. And but the wall of connection coming back is often more disturbing than anything else, kind of yeah, you know, because it's overwhelming, and it's also it's a lot of it takes place with a character inside their heads that's a version of me that isn't actually me. They have deep, deep connections to a
version of me, but it's not actually me. And I don't know them at all, so they I don't have any connection to them, you know what I mean. Like I have not thought them, I don't know them at all, So like, but they have this very real, deep connection to me that means the world to them. Yeah, and it and it has provided solace and joy and a million other feelings throughout their life. I've been present and for all these parts of their life for them, but
I wasn't actually there at all. So for me, it's like, I don't know what you're talking about, but I wasn't there for that I was over here.
Have you had that experience with anyone who you really admire, any musicians who you feel extremely close to, and then you've met them, and it's just sort.
Of have a lot of trouble talking to my idols. I have trouble forming sentences with certain of my idols, who are the nicest people in the world, but I can't always think of anything to say. Yeah, there are people who have been great to me my entire career, who I've known for decades, and they have been nothing but nice to me, and I cannot form sentences around them, and we're not friends because of that, you know, Like it's a weird thing. Yeah, I mean, because I'm probably
a lot more hesitant and careful about that. I don't come up with the expectation of knowing them because I don't, and I'm alter hyper aware of that because I've been on both sides of it, So like, I don't, you know, I don't show up to Bruce Springsteen House expecting to be Bruce's best friend, even though Bruce is the nicest guy on earth. You know, he's the nicest, kindest guy, one of the nice people I've ever met in my life. And I have a deep connection to that stuff. But
it's not real, you know what I mean. I can't show up to his house. Yeah shame.
You probably could, but you won't.
We'll try. I'll try at some point.
Yeah. Thank you Adams so much, and thank you and have fun on tour.
Ah, we will, thanks so much.
You can hear the latest Counting Crow's album, Butter Miracle, The Complete Suits, as well as our favorite Counting Crow songs on a playlist LinkedIn episode description and again. To see the video version of this episode, visit YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast and be sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record Pod. You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing help from
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