Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
ADAM DURITZ WANTS YOU IN HIS CLUB
As Brothers Osborne head out to their next engagement, Counting Crows will roll into the Walmart AMP for their first visit to Rogers since 2017.
The “Butter Miracle Tour” sees the alternative rockers supporting their first release in seven years: an EP of four songs meant to be performed one immediately after another — a suite. “Butter Miracle, Suite One” was around 85% finished when covid-19 broke out, lead singer and songwriter Adam Duritz reveals. The collection dropped in May, but by late July — as the band prepared to return to the road — they had still not performed the whole suite, beginning to end, together live.
“When we recorded the songs, we didn’t end each song. We would go into the first verse of the next song, and then we would stop. So we made sure the transitions worked, but we didn’t play the whole thing,” Duritz says of finally getting to record the songs last summer. “That’s like this exciting thing that’s still waiting out there for us that’s never been the case. We always have played the songs by the time we got to the tour. But this time, we’ve never done it. And so it’ll be a whole new experience still out there for us even after we released a record — which I’ve never experienced that before.”
Even the actualization process for the EP was unusual thanks to covid. It’s not in Duritz’s nature to hold onto songs or pieces of songs for a long time, he admits. For each new project, he typically writes the whole album around the same time, and then the band gets to work recording.
“I’d finished ‘Tall Grass,’ and the next day, I was playing it back, just trying to figure out if it was actually done or if there was more to it,” he recalls. “And then I just found myself singing this line, ‘Bobby was a kid from round the town,’ which is the beginning of ‘Elevator Boots,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, maybe this is a longer song like “Palisades Park.” It’s got this other section.’”
When he realized “Bobby” was leading him into another song, not just another section, Duritz was inspired to write a series of songs where the beginning of one is the ending of the one before. The first suite of “Butter Miracle” came together as “a bitesize piece of music that’s long, but you could sit in one sitting and listen to it,” Duritz says. At 18 minutes, the collection was longer than a song, but shorter than an album and gave the band the opportunity to explore something that had a reason to be shorter. It would still be several months, though, before the band could record together to see if what worked in Duritz’s imagination actually translated to the listening experience he was envisioning.
“There’s been a lot of talk in the last 15 to 20 years about how it’s better for bands to release singles than records. And probably, as far as the commerce of it goes, it is better, because people don’t seem to want to listen to records anymore. People want to just pick what they want, and so it’s harder to give them a whole thing,” Duritz muses. “But it doesn’t do you any good to know that it’s smarter to release a song if that’s not what you do well. We happen to do this one thing really well,
which is create these worlds for people to climb into — albums. And people can get lost in them and really, that experience moves people. They like it. We’ve had some singles, but it’s more accidental than anything else.”
Clearly, people do like it. Coming up on three decades together shows the Crows are certainly doing something right. Duritz reminisces on Counting Crows’ first year of touring when the Rolling Stones invited the new band to open for them. The first gig of that tour, at the RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., was on Duritz’s 30th birthday. He remembers thinking, “How do you make a band that lasts 30 years? That seems impossible to have a band be alive as long as I am.”
“And now here I am, and it’s been almost 30 years, and we’re still here and we’ve got a song that’s No. 1, and that’s pretty crazy,” he says of “Elevator Boots” landing at No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Airplay chart.
One might wonder if Counting Crows, as a band that found massive breakout fame in the early 1990s, is benefiting from the wave of nostalgia for the era that seems to be taking over pop culture. But Duritz isn’t interested in any of that.
“I enjoy social media; I’ve always thought it was a great thing. It enables people to connect directly to their audience instead of through intermediaries. … But the downside of it is it’s this great cultural thing where we all want to get together and agree,” he poses. “We all want to look at a meme and go, ‘Yep, me too.’ It’s this great homogeneity of things.
“I just kind of find the whole thing — all the mass cultural discussions where we nod and smile about something that we all know is funny now — I’m just bored by it. I don’t care which nostalgia it is, I’m not nostalgic for something along with everybody else. I don’t want to do anything with everybody else.
“There were bands I loved during the ’90s; I bet they’re not the ones [the masses are] nostalgic for. The same thing was true in the ’90s. I have my own tastes. I want to be excited about stuff — I want to enjoy music and the arts and movies and s***. I just kind of don’t want to be in any club with everybody else,” he says adamantly, before adding with a smile: “Except if it’s our club. I would really love that. That’s the only one.”