Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz joins a new episode of the Rolling Stone Uncut podcast!
The frontman of the legendary US band joined the show while in Sydney ahead of Counting Crows’ headline tour of New Zealand and Australia starting later this month.
Recorded at Forbes Street Studios, Duritz sat down with Editor-in-Chief Neil Griffiths for a wide-ranging conversation and touched on a range of topics like Counting Crows’ relationship with local favourites Gang of Youths, the perceived backlash after their Shrek 2 hit “Accidentally in Love” and what the future looks like for the group.
Listen to or watch the full episode below.
How Gang of Youths inspired Counting Crows’ latest album Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!
“[Gang of Youths frontman David Le’aupepe] sent me [2022 album] Angel in Realtime. I had sung on it twice because they, they made the album twice. I sung on it like a year before that. And then they kind of scrapped the record, hopefully not because my background was so bad!
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“I got home, and a few weeks later, David sent me what they had, and I was like, ‘This is better. It’s much better.’ And I’ve never done it before in my entire life. It wasn’t like I trashed a lot of it. I rewrote the choruses for ‘Under the Aurora’. I tightened up ‘Spaceman and Tulsa’. I didn’t change anything on ‘Virginia Through the Rain.’
“It was kind of a really lucky thing to me because hearing my friend’s record, I thought, ‘Oh, good. You know what? This is the level I’m supposed to be working at. This is not quite there. I’m going to go back and work on it.'”
Getting the call for Shrek 2
“As soon as they asked me, I was really excited about it because, man, there’s very few things that are timeless in our world. But a great animated movie for kids is that one thing. Like, my mum saw Snow White when she was a kid. I saw Snow White when I was a kid… those songs from those movies become the standard. in a way. Almost nothing else lasts like that.
“I don’t know about the fans or the sellout thing. To me… if you do anything different from what you’ve been doing and what they’ve depended on, they’re so panicked that you’re gonna turn to shit, you know? And so they’ll do that. But for me, it was just like, absolutely, no -brainer. This is going to last forever.”
Future of Counting Crows
“I mean, you do always dream it lasts forever. It just doesn’t. But here we are, and it’s lasted a really long time. And I mean, it’s kind of a day -by -day thing. But I had no plans to not do this.
” I keep thinking at some point something’s going to happen, because age -wise, there’s three guys in the band who are older than me and three guys in the band who are younger than me. And I’m 61… It’s gruelling, you know? But at the moment, I think everyone’s really, really happy. We all get along great… we have lives outside of the band, and we spend our life together, for the most part, so we don’t see each other that much off the road. But on the road, I think we all really enjoy the hang and we love playing together.”
