Adam Duritz From Counting Crows Discusses The New Album, Live Gigs & Internet Promotion (Interview)
Tuesday, 10 April 2012
Written by James Ball
First of all, if you could take us right back to the beginning. How did the Counting Crows start life as a band?
Sure. Well, we all knew each other already right at the start. We were all friends and we were already in bands, and just ended up getting together, writing songs, playing clubs and all of that. Since then, some people have joined us, but they were all people who were there back then too.
So it feels like a real community aspect surrounding the band?
Yeah. We've all been together for a long time now. We'd all jump in front of trains for each other. We'd all go out every night if we could with each other. It's like being in a band full of brothers. We're very close to each other in that sense. I've essentially spent as long with these guys now as I did living with my siblings growing up. It's essentially been twenty years now living together on the road, basically.
Now then, we come to your first album 'August and Everything After', and in particular the track 'Mr Jones'. You guys hit a lot of major success very early on. What were the pressures associated with that and how did you deal with them?
Erm...they weren't really “pressures” so much. It was all kinda weird. I guess we made a lot of decisions right early on. At the start we had something like fifteen labels trying to get us so in many respects we could get what we wanted. We basically gave away all the money up front in exchange for total creative control and higher royalties. We wanted our records to be our records. We made the first album in a house we rented. We didn't actually go to a studio. That we we could just get away from everything for a while and make our record in our way. Even with that the record label didn't originally want us to put out Mr Jones. They wanted a certain other type of hit with a certain drumbeat. We'd already written the songs and didn't want to edit anything, so we then suggested Mr Jones, so we agreed to disagree and the label put out nothing. We went out on the road with no singles, no radio exposure and no nothing. We went out with Suede, The Cranberries and Cracker, and then came back and told the label we wanted to put out Mr Jones, so then they did.
And the next thing you know it's just this huge song.
Yeah. It's not really the song that broke us though. That was (1994 single) 'Round Here'. We weren't even in the US Top 200 when we played Saturday Night Live, and we opened that show with 'Round Here', and that record suddenly shot! We were in the US Top 40 then for five weeks. I think that a lot of the reason that people have stayed with us for so long is because we're the kind of band that would write 'Round Here' and play it like that.
So, we're going to move on to the new album 'Underwater Sunshine'. In your own words, what is the main idea behind this record?
It's just something we wanted to do. What with the way that we play cover songs, it's as close to being our own record as it could be. I know that in the wake of Dylan it's become a bit vogue to write, and I'm all for that because I'm a songwriter. A lot of what we do on any given record is write. I come up with skeleton of chords and a handful of words, and then we as a band turn that into a song, and that's also what we did on this album for the most part. The only thing that was different is the skeleton chords and the words were already there, which freed up a lot of time to write the actual songs. It's great because we got to play a lot of different stuff and songs that we love, it's just that we're just interpreting these songs in a certain way. There's a lot of interpretation in rock and roll and in all forms of music really. I don't think Elvis himself wrote very much or the Supremes did but they still made great music, and I kinda dig that. There's a lot of great songwriters out there and a lot of great songs, so who says there should be some rule saying we shouldn't play them too? We really feel like we made these songs our own, and if we didn't feel like we made it our own, we left it off the record. There was a Joe Jackson song that we covered and it was an absolute killer, but we left it off because it just sounded like a cover song, and we didn't want that.
My personal favourite from the record is 'Hospital', the Cody Brown song.
Isn't it great?
Yeah. I mean, I've never heard that song before now.
Yeah. Neither had we originally. We were just starting this, and Cody Brown came in with the demo. Their record's not even out yet and the song wasn't even properly recorded when it came to us. I thought the song was awesome! I was really not feeling too good at the time we did the second session of songs for this record, songs that included 'Hospital', 'Like Teenage Gravity', 'All My Failures' and the rest. I was on a medication withdrawal at the time, but these songs turn into some of the best on the record. I was shaking and twitching throughout this sessions due to coming off these medications, but I could see these songs with such great clarity, I could just come up with the arrangements. We hit these songs full blown. With 'Hospital', we just started playing it and knew where every hit was supposed to go. We could direct the band to put all these hits in these places and I'm amazed by how well that song turned out. It's such a great song. As soon as we started played we just knew what we had to do. We often have ideas when it comes to writing songs, but we rarely hit them full blown like that one, and 'Like Teenage Gravity' as well. We're good collaborators. It's a lot of fun.
It just proves the power of music now that songs like these are making their way out there. Songs not just by the biggest bands, but songs by bands that are just coming through.
In many ways throughout the making of this album I was thinking “Wow. We've just made the most obscure covers album ever made”. It wasn't really intended to be that way but we did end up leaving off a few big ones. We left off 'Local Boy in a Photograph' from Stereophonics first album. That one was really good, it's just we didn't finish it in time. That one still needed a lot of work. The real thing though is that there are some truly great bands out there that people never hear and there are some great, great songs from these bands. Maybe in a few years these bands won't be so little-known anymore. People will be talking about Coby Brown and sharing how he's great, or Romany Rye because they're a killer band, and how Kasey Anderson is just amazing.
So was part of the general idea designed to make sure there were some of the bigger names on there, especially the likes of Bob Dylan, The Faces, Teenage Fanclub and, in this country in particular, Travis. Or was it just “Here's a bunch of songs we really like, we should play them?”
There was no thought whatsoever about how big a song or band was. That Teenage Fanclub album ('Songs from Northern Britain') over here is not big. In fact that's my favourite Teenage Fanclub record. Even that Travis song ('Coming Around'), it didn't actually come from a record. It made its way onto a hits album later on, but it was originally released between 'The Man Who' and 'The Invisible Band'. We were playing festivals that summer and I remember seeing them so many times and being blown away by how fucking rock they were playing live. So much more so than on the records, which is something I really like. Live they were incredible. So much blast-off guitars that you didn't get so much on the record. They were just awesome. Then they played 'Coming Around', which I just assumed would be the first single from 'The Invisible Band', but it didn't make it onto a record, and I have never met anyone over in the US since that song was recorded who owns it. There's loads of people I know who had bought the single in England, but no-one, not even Travis fans in America. When I saw it being played it was like they were playing a Zombies song. I was just blown away at that time. I heard the original again recently, and our version just sounds more like them playing it live, then their recorded version. Its much louder, faster and rockier. Before this no-one else in the band really knew the song, so when we had our first day in the studio for this record, we just played a bunch of stuff we knew and it really sucked. So I went home that night and gave David (guitars) and Millard (bass) this song, and 'Local Boy in the Photograph' and just asked them to learn the chords to those two songs. Just the chords and structure. Don't play it to anyone else, and don't listen to it too often. Then just go to the studio and teach it to the other guys before I got back from a meeting. That way everyone had a clean palette to work from as no-one but me really knew the song or how it was recorded, and it ended up sounded very different. From then on, the recording sessions improved and everyone got on with it much better. Therefore 'Coming Around' really saved that first session because we were feeling dead in the water without it.
Cool. Now, do you have any plans at this time to tour this record?
Yeah, we're going out pretty much now in America, and then again in the summer on a tour across the US again with six bands. It's going to feel quite a lot like a roadshow. We'll rotate the bands on the bill and it'll be a bit like putting together a little festival. So we'll be going around America all summer long, and then hopefully we'll come across to the UK in the fall. We really wanted to come over for the festival season this year, so we really wanted to come over right away. Sadly we had a bit of a miscommunication and by the time we got to enquire about spots it was a little too late. So we'll have to wait to do that until next year, but we're thinking about coming over anyway in the fall. I think the festivals are the most fun way to tour Europe. More than anything else, I really like them. It's such a unique experience touring festivals in Europe, and I'd like to make the most of it. There's so many festivals in Europe we don't know yet which ones to play. I had a really good time playing Isle of Wight the year we did that. The sun was out and it was just a great fun day.
This record is coming out on a comparatively minor label, Cooking Vinyl. Any particular reason behind going with a much smaller label as opposed to one of the majors?
For one thing, they don't really know how to do anything. We've been making this record ourselves and we can use the internet net. We've been doing these covers and can put them up online. We asked each of the bands on the Outlaw Roadshow back in March to submit a song and we put them all up online for download on our website to learn about all of the bands. We had over 25,000 downloads from that in a week We put one of our songs up there as well, and that got 3,000 downloads, but the first band, Filligar, they got around 7 or 8,000 downloads already. It's just a great way to promote your record. We did have a six song sampler ready for streaming, and have now put the whole album up on our and other websites in full that people can stream and we could never do any of that stuff with the major label. It was always about radioplay, and radioplay's great as always but not everyone's got a boombox or CD player anymore. Everyone's got ipods. We were asked to play SXSW last year in one of the bigger auditoriums, and they wanted us to put on another big band with us, so they asked us how many people we thought we'd draw. We said about 10,000 and they decided not to put a bigger band on. So we put on a few smaller indie bands with us, like Deer Tick and Tender Mercies, and 25,000 people showed up, which is as many people as you can fit in that place! It was a massive park and it was sold to absolute safety levels. When we put on the Outlaw Roadshow, 5,000 people jammed in there to hear a bunch of indie bands no-one had ever heard of between noon and 6pm. Therefore you can promote you record yourself like that pretty much for free. The majors just try to send your record to radio stations who probably won't end up playing most of it anyway. I don't really want to be on radio so much anymore. I'm tired of it. I mean, it's good, but it was such a big thing in 1995. For me, Cooking Vinyl work really well with us. They give us a fair share of the money. They let us have the creative control. They don't bitch when we do things our way, and they're giving our streaming player for the album across the US and very soon to a bunch of bloggers and music sites in the UK and around the continent. I want people to hear this record because I think they'll like it, and if they like it I think they'll buy it, and then they'll come and see us play, and when we play, we think they'll come back again. That's why we're on Cooking Vinyl.
Ok. Well, I've got a few questions left now, following on from the record, and more about you. How would you, personally, spend any time off? That is, on the off-chance you get any.
Well, this year I've stayed inside quite a lot and watched a lot of movies. I've actually been working on a play for a lot of the last year. That's part of the reason we did covers for this album too because a lot of my writing skills have gone towards this play. I didn't want to divide up my writing in two places at once. We did a whole bunch of concerts last summer where we showed the first act, and it was very well received, so I'm excited about that.
What's the play called?
Black Sun.
Cool. Well, we'll have to keep our eyes open for that one. Moving on, speaking from your own experience, what advice would you give to any people out there that are starting up a band, or are in a small group already and want to move onto the next level?
Well, the only next level is getting better. There is no next level really. You have to play music because you want to play because success is very very difficult. That said it's better nowadays to be in a band than it ever was before, with maybe the early 80s being the only exception due to college radio and the labels at that time. Right now though, you can do it yourself. You can make records fairly cheaply on your computer and promote them yourselves. You can use the internet to your hearts content. The internet is inclusive, not exclusive. It's all about getting the music to people without actually “giving” it to them. If you're good, people will like it. If people like it, you can have a career. It's the opposite of a record label who always try to protect your music from people. People should be able to hear it. With the record, we wrote all these covers by bands people had never heard of accidentally, but we're doing everything in our power to credit these bands. We talk about them, we put them on our showcase, we put them on our website, we put them on the road. It's much more possible now to have a career and sustain it. It's difficult to get to super-stardom, but you can survive because you can get more money back now than you used to and get the music out easier. People are already on the internet buying it, so you don't have to ship anything. You just send it electronically via MP3. There are people out there, so you can find the bloggers. The bloggers will write about you. There used to be a lot of people telling me what sucks about the music industry. Now there's a lot of people telling me what they love. So find those people and talk to them. That's who's going to champion your record. Also, you can go be friends with them because they're just like you. They just love music. They just want to write about it, and they pay for it with their time. Most don't even get paid for it. People just like writing about the music they like, so it's a better time now to be in a band then it ever was before. Don't do it because you have to do it though. Do it because you want to.
Well, one of the biggest early examples of that was Arctic Monkeys, who were pretty much the catalyst of the MySpace music explosion. Totally unheard of pretty much outside of Sheffield in the mid-2000s and then using the power of internet and then the hype machine they created, they became one of the biggest bands and most successful bands in this country in modern times.
Yeah. I'd only heard of that band originally because of someone in my crew gave me their first record. I hadn't heard of them before but he heard their music from the internet and then gave a copy of their album to me to listen to. The internet's great as it crosses international borders cheaply too.
Finally, there's one random question that I ask everyone I interview. Imagine there's a cocktail called the Counting Crows. What would be in it?
Well...if it were me it would just be a margarita because I make them really well. We played a show once in New Orleans and it was so hot and the venue was packed and so I told the guy I wanted a margarita because it was a hundred degrees in that club, so he taught me how to make them. We then set up our own little bar on stage and just kept making margaritas throughout that show, and this then became a bit of a tradition. The next year we set up a bar on stage and had someone else make them for us. Truthfully though, they have started making a drink for me backstage because I eventually stopped with the margaritas. It's lime juice and tequila and I don't know what the fuck else is in it! I don't even think it's very good! I preferred the margaritas, but the guy is so impressive when he makes them, and his friends always come and want that drink. I guess you can't really go wrong with tequila. It's a good building block as there's a lot of flavours you can add. Also, I used to live in California, so I'm a big fan of wine. If we could play gigs there every night, I would get drunk at every gig! I would have bottles of wine on stage every night and enjoy myself no end! Of course I can't do that every night as it would be exhausting and I'd become an alcoholic. If I could do it once a month, I'd be drunk and it would be fun times for everyone!
Well. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thanks very much for your time and hopefully we'll catch you if you come to play here in the autumn.
Thank you very much.
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
We don't run any advertising! Our editorial content is solely funded by lovely people like yourself using Stereoboard's listings when buying tickets for live events. To keep supporting us, next time you're looking for concert, festival, sport or theatre tickets, please search for "Stereoboard". It costs you nothing, you may find a better price than the usual outlets, and save yourself from waiting in an endless queue on Friday mornings as we list ALL available sellers!
So, we're going to move on to the new album 'Underwater Sunshine'. In your own words, what is the main idea behind this record?
