5 Minutes w/ Adam Duritz of The Counting Crows
First published in The Santa Barbara Sentinel. Photo by Megan Waldrep
The voice of Adam Duritz led the Counting Crows to sell 20 million records worldwide over a 20-year span.
Adam and guitarist David Bryson formed the band in Berkeley in 1991, and as their San Francisco fan base grew, so did their members.
Now seven in total, download the band’s newest album, Somewhere Under Wonderland, to get the goods.
Adam takes five with us to catch up.
What song(s) do you guys like to play?
For the last four or five years, we’ve really been obsessed with songs off (the album), This Desert Life. The whole band has been into playing them. This year, “Goodnight Elizabeth” is coming back (into rotation), and we’re playing it a lot, and it’s been great.
Is there an overall favorite song you personally like to perform live?
Not really. It changes all the time. I will say I never get tired of playing “Long December.” It never seems to move out of the set, and I don’t mind that. I’m not sure if it’s my favorite song or anything, but I never get tired of playing it.
What is your best memory of making your most recent album, Somewhere Under Wonderland?
I don’t really know. Making albums is hard. It’s not necessarily something you look back on thinking it was fun. It’s really difficult, but it’s very satisfying.
“Palisades Park” is a great (song on the album). I was really happy with the songs we had written up until then, but as soon as we wrote “Palisades Park,”… it was really special to me. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.
Why is that?
It’s got a lot of complexity to it. For years, we sometimes take our songs and take a left turn in the middle and expand them that way. But I’ve never really been able to compose that in a song before. To take what we do live and put that into the composition of the song…it kind of encompasses everything is the band is known for, which is hard to do. When it was done, I thought, “Well, this is really cool.”
The Counting Crows album, Somewhere Under Wonderland, is available on iTunes, Amazon, and all major music retail websites.
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