Counting Crows: A U2 Cover Saved The Band
Wednesday May 07, 2008 @ 11:30 AM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

By Erik Leijon

Anyone who stumbled upon the Coca-Cola-hawking "American Girls" or the Oscar-nominated and uncharacteristically cheery "Accidentally In Love" (from the Shrek 2 soundtrack) in recent years, one might have been lulled into thinking Berkeley, Calif.'s Counting Crows and emotive frontman Adam Duritz were mellowing after 15 years as one of the most prolific American roots rock groups. On their new Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings album, the dreadlock-sporting Duritz opens by shouting, "I'm a Russian Jew American/Impersonating African Jamaican" on "1492." That quashes any of that "Counting Crows softening" rhetoric. ChartAttack recently had the chance to talk to Duritz at his home in New York City.

Counting Crows

ChartAttack: The new album, Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, sounds rather ambitious conceptually. Tell me about it.
Adam Duritz: There wasn't a concept at the beginning. It just started with me listening to "1492" and realizing for the first time in a long time I had a record I wanted to make — about that disintegration with that song and where I had landed in my life. It's an album I've wanted to make for a long time, but the songs never fit. I wanted to work with Gil Norton [who produced Pixies and Foo Fighters], and I wanted 20 days to record it. We started making Saturday Night although it wasn't called that then. As I was getting better, some stuff I was working on was for Sunday Mornings, this possibly different album that springs out of Saturday Nights — segued from the first album. This all happened in the period of a few weeks, demoing in the lounge and my living room. Eventually [Modest Mouse producer] Brian Deck came in and kind of all of a sudden the album became this thing. But it all started with "1492." It's kind of funny, because everybody wanted that song off of the record.

It seems strange that a song nobody wanted on the record would eventually become the album opener.
There was a lot of resistance. We were told it would be a much better album if we weren't wedded to the concept, but it was the songs that created the concept and not the other way around. They wanted to move the prettier songs to the front so it wouldn't be so ugly, "People wouldn't want to listen to ugly songs written about yourself," they said, "Get rid of the darker, louder stuff, like 'Amsterdam.' It's embarrassingly raw.' "Get rid of the electric guitars on 'You Can't Count On Me."' It's got the ugliest lines I've ever written about myself. It's supposed to draw you in and punch you in the face. They even suggested to get rid of the "T" in "You Can't Count On Me." There was never any danger to change it, but there was a lot of pressure to make it more homogenized. It would have sucked and I don't want to be a pussy about making records.

The opening lines of "1492" about your ethnic background are pretty striking. What was the motivation for the songwriting on this album?
It's an album about losing contact with the world. It's about moving further and further away from reality, being less and less able to connect and becoming more desperate in your attempts to find a way to matter, to exist. It's about becoming so lost in this void. I was thinking, "I've moved around my whole life. I have no sense of self at all anymore. So here's a list of who I am: I am Russian, I am Jewish, I am American. I have these dreadlocks. People think I'm black sometimes. I'm impersonating a black person, but I have this Jamaican haircut. I grew up in Texas, traveling around Indian reservations in the summer with my parents, which are sad, desperate places, but I was still living on the Texas border riding horseback. I don't know who the fuck I am."

I know the band did a lot of work on the re-release of August And Everything After. What do you think of the album 15 years later?
It's the one record that has songs I don't think we nailed playing live back then. We were so new. Well, we did nail them, it's just that I got better at singing them. There are some songs on that record I couldn't sing at the time. I wasn't that good a singer yet. I love the record, the songs are great, and that concert [the re-release includes a disc containing the final show from their 1994 tour in Paris] was a fantastic concert. It saved the band. It's the reason we're still here. If you listen carefully, on "Anna Begins" I sound dead. But by the time we hit "Round Here," you start to feel that this is actually going to save my life. After that, everything galvanizes and the show becomes something different. The last song is 15 minutes and I don't want to stop. The concert includes this clip from the U2 song "Red Hill Mining Town," the lyrics "I'm hanging on/You're all that's left to hold on to," and I'm howling it over and over. This band, that music, that night, that was all I had left. I was going crazy, but all that was still there and I realized it that night. We had to take some time off afterwards because I was a wackjob, but it saved the band.