For years, people told Adam Duritz not to bother releasing full albums, that “nobody wants to listen to ’em anymore.” So he released Counting Crows‘ most ambitious music ever — an interlocked, glam-rock-infused four-song sequence — as an EP, 2021’s Butter Miracle, Suite One. “But I found that there was a certain amount of dismissal of the suite because it wasn’t a full record,” he says. “As much as everyone says everyone just wants to listen to single songs, there’s a certain judgment if it’s not a whole record.” Three years later, the band is back with a strong new album, Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!, which finally rounds out that EP with five new songs. Durtiz sat down in his Manhattan apartment to talk about the long process behind the album, growing up “broken,” an upcoming new documentary on the band, and more.
There’s a lot of Nineties artists who’ve died and a lot of bands that have broken up. But you’re still here.
Yeah, some of them I knew, and we were friends. There are what you could call good reasons why bands break up. But they’re not great reasons a lot of the time. A lot of it’s just frustration, jealousy, money. I think if you want to, you can always find a reason why you deserve more, no matter who you are.
You just gotta figure out what’s really important to you. I realized early on, I always wanted to be in a band. I don’t wanna be a solo artist. I love the jazz of being in a band. I like the interaction. And I found myself in a band that I really loved. And so staying in, that’s been my priority forever. I just made that the first priority. Those guys really matter to me. I gotta make sure they’re all OK. And that way we get to do this year after year.
You wouldn’t feel all the emotion in my songs if it wasn’t for how good they are at interpreting that shit and how good they are bringing it out. People don’t appreciate those guys. They’re not, like, famous as band guys, but they’re fucking great. And I recognize that. I appreciate them so much.
When I was a kid, I figured out what I wanted to do in life before any of my friends. And I was suddenly ahead of everybody. Then I fell behind when they actually got jobs and I was washing dishes. And then this fucking thing worked out, which is a fucking miracle. It’s not that we don’t deserve it or anything, but it’s just dumb luck, because it doesn’t matter how good you are. Success in the arts, who knows what the fuck it’s all about.
And I’m sure I’m a frustrating person to work with sometimes. ‘Cause I got a lot of ideas that maybe don’t seem like the greatest ideas. I just want us to do our thing, and I don’t want to chase what we did last time. I wanna find things that fascinate us and do ’em. I’m sure we missed out on a bunch of success by not repeating some of that stuff. By not singing the songs exactly the same way in concert, whatever we did that people don’t like or didn’t like, or people I dated that made everybody hate us, I don’t know. But fuck, 30 years later we are still in this band. Most of us are still here. I don’t know, man. That’s just really cool. I think a lot about it, because I’m really proud of the fact that we’re still in the band.
There’s also the “staying alive” part.
I did a lot of drugs when I was a kid, but I have a pretty severe mental illness too, and that at a certain point did not mix well with drugs. And it was horrifying. Like, really scary dissociation, mixed with hallucinations is not good. And it started affecting me in ways even when I didn’t take the drugs. I spent, like, a year between the age of 21 and 22 in a halfway hallucinatory state.
You’re talking about acid?
Yeah. Feeling like I was on acid without taking acid. I’d already taken acid, but when this came on I didn’t, and I went through some pretty scary shit right then, and I had to stop doing drugs. I was done with drugs by 21, I couldn’t take them anymore ’cause I couldn’t hack what it felt like to be on them. It just made every drug turn into acid.
I think in a way that might have saved me in a lot of other ways, because I didn’t have to go through all the drug use when I was a huge famous rock star, when I could do every drug I wanted to all day, every day. Because I watched that be deadly for some other people. And I could have seen that being a big problem for me. ‘Cause I really liked doing drugs, but I just couldn’t. It was terrifying.
This dissociation and the acid flashback thing. It still happens a lot of the time. I’m used to it now to the point where I can breathe through it, but it was really scary. You don’t want to be on a drug for a year — not acid, not for a year. I thought I would never come out of that. And I thought my life was over at 21. In a lot of ways, though, it did really save me from a lot of difficulties later on that I saw other guys go through. I didn’t know Kurt (Cobain) well, but I did know him and he was really nice to me. He just seemed like a really sweet guy.
There’s that line about being broken as a child on the new album. Is that you?
Oh, yeah. But it’s other people too. We face things sometimes. Some people face them in their families. I faced stuff from outside my family, just difficulties and just insanity, stuff that’s inside your head. There’s nothing anyone can do to protect you from things that are inside your own head. Other things, they have doctors for them. Even now, we really don’t have doctors for mental illness. We don’t really know what causes it or how to fix it. The brain’s a weird thing, man.
And it was a real scary realization to come to that — oh, there’s nothing anybody can do. I have to figure out how to get out of this. And I don’t have any ability to do that at all. Man, there were some times when I was a kid that I just did not think it was possible to survive. When you’re a kid, your whole life is laid out for you, people tell you what to do, they tell you where to go, tell you what time to be there, tell you what you gotta do before you show up tomorrow. And if something goes wrong, they tell you how to fix it, or they take you to somebody to fix it.
That’s the general structure of it. A lot of kids find themselves in situations for a variety of reasons, and there’s nobody to help them. Sometimes it’s because they’re on their own. Sometimes it’s because the problem is such that nobody knows what to do about it. And that’s one of the reasons why a lot of what kids are going through nowadays in isolated communities, queer communities, trans communities, communities of people of color…I have my own way where I really relate to that, because I had a situation that no one could help me with and I had great parents, who tried really hard and would’ve done anything for me, but just was beyond everybody’s control.
Half of this album, the interlocked Butter Miracle: Suite One, came out as an EP in 2021, but you’re only now releasing the full album. How did that process work?
The first half we recorded right before the pandemic, so that put things off by a little bit. But as soon as it ended, I went back to my friend’s farm in England, where I wrote the first half, and I went back to work to write some more stuff.
So I went back to work on it. I wrote a bunch of stuff and I felt like I’d finished it. On the way home, I stopped in London to sing on my friend’s record — one of my best friends is a singer (David Le’aupepe) for this Australian band Gang of Youths. And I had already sung on the record, but they scrapped it and changed to a more ambitious version of it. So I went to sing on it again, and they sent me the finished record, Angel in Real Time. I think it’s one of my favorite records of the last decade. I just couldn’t escape the thought that the stuff I’d written wasn’t at that level. So I went back to the drawing board on some of it.
What were the sticking points for you?
Musically, the songs were a lot more ambitious, and I couldn’t tell if they were actually any good at being ambitious. Part of it was they weren’t well-written enough at first, some of them. And part of it was just my inability to play them (on my own), and I sat for a good two years. And then I wrote “With Love from A to Z” and I loved that. And I knew it was good. And the question was, now what do I do? Like, “This one’s great. What do I do with it, though, if there’s nothing else?”
And I called up Jim (Bogios) and Millard (Powers), our bass player and drummer, and I said, “I need everybody to come here and stay with me for a week. I can’t tell if these songs are any good, maybe demo them.” I don’t demo much. But I said, “I need you to come here to my house. We’ll just sit in the living room. It’ll take a week, maybe less, and we’ll just do it.” And we just sat here in the living room for a week. I cooked for everybody and we just went through them one by one. Everyone was really thrilled, and we were in the studio two weeks later recording them.
Took 11 days, maybe. We just blew through them. It was really two or three years of me sitting around just not having the confidence to send them to the band. I guess it’s fine ’cause it wouldn’t really have been ready until we had “With Love from A to Z” anyways. But I’ve never had that happen before. I’ve never really rewritten anything. But I just didn’t have confidence.
It’s hard to go into something that you thought was finished and tear its guts out. There’s a lot of writers who aren’t comfortable with that kind of rearranging.
I certainly wasn’t. And, like, the “(Under the) Aurora” chorus, (Duritz’s girlfriend) Zoe really loved it. She was like, “Oh, I fucking really missed that chorus.” She loves the new one more. But when I was talking about getting rid of it, she was like, “I really don’t think that’s a great idea.” I just knew something was wrong with it.
How did the old one go?
“Calling for oxygen/’Cause I cannot breathe without you….” It was a pretty cool chorus. It just didn’t mean much to me. It was a cool line, but it didn’t mean anything to me really. It just didn’t have the passion. It was just lacking something.
I think you’ve talked about the danger of writing something that sounds like it would be cool in a song versus something that actually means something to you or means something, period.
I’ve usually been pretty good at policing that. There are things that sound like great lyrics should sound. “Sister Christian,” that’s one of those phrases. Fleetwood Mac pulls it off with “Crystal Visions.” But there are things that sound poetic and aren’t particularly meaningful. I don’t know, maybe those do mean a lot to those people.
With the song “Box Cars,” one of the problems was I couldn’t finish it at all. During the pandemic, we had these two years of sitting around, and I guess I’d gone really stir crazy. I cooked a lot, but I spent a lot of time running around the house, making up songs about our cats and just nonsense shit. One of the ones that I was running around the house being most annoying with was this one that went, (in a vaguely heavy-metal cadence) “coronavirus, duhnt-duhnt, coronavirus.” (Laughs.) And I ran around the house, humming that to myself, this metal song about coronavirus, for ages.
And when I was working on “Box Cars,” I was trying to figure out a way to come outta the chorus and I had a riff that sounded so familiar. I’m like, what is that thing? And then I realized, “Oh fuck, it’s that coronavirus song!” I called Immer (multi-instrumentalist David Immerglück), and he’s like “Oh, that’s a cool riff. What is that?” I’m like, “I don’t wanna tell you. Just play it.”
I just recently learned that you played bass in high school.
Earlier, like 13-ish. I cannot figure out how that was possible ’cause the way I think of a bass now, it is the hardest instrument. I can’t imagine. I don’t know how the hell… I imagine I must have been playing really simple parts. We were all playing, we had these — our parents each offered to buy us a songbook. So we got the Beatles, Stones, and Zeppelin. They were the biggest songbooks, and we mostly played those songs, with a little Kiss in there. And I have no facility for it whatsoever now. It was something I did when I was really young and I probably never touched it again. So it’s not like I kept up a little bit or that. I picked up the piano after that.
One of the things that’s really fresh on this album and was present in this suite as well, is this glam-rock energy that’s pretty new to the band. Where did that come from?
I’ve always loved Mott the Hoople and Lou Reed and Bowie, and those are big parts of me. But I think that’s part of the ambition in the songwriting that hit during this period of the last 10 years that I’ve been looking at. There’s some of that in (2014’s) “Palisades Park” too, and you could hear “Elvis Went to Hollywood.” There’s little bits of it on that album of me just dipping my toes in it. I think it’s just something I’ve been feeling for a while.
And a lot of the songs have to do with sexuality and bisexuality, different isolated groups of people and how they’re forced to live nowadays. I’m a Jew, it’s not a majority. And I feel the weirdness of that in my life. And I think as a result of that, in a lot of ways in the last 10 or 12 years, I’ve really thought a lot about other people living in sort of isolation and difficulties. It’s a big part of the lyrics, at least on Somewhere Under Wonderland. Certainly “Palisades Park” is about these two kids just discovering their sexuality, dressing differently, that also pops up on “Bobby and the Rat Kings” and other songs.
It’s just something I’ve been thinking about. I grew up in San Francisco in the Seventies and Eighties, and I was growing up around that culture as a kid, seeing a lot of people who’d come to San Francisco who’d clearly been terrified in their childhoods and now were finding a sort of sense of freedom. Those memories about that were really coming to the front when I was writing “Palisades Park” and some other stuff. I’ve just been thinking about it a lot in recent years.
For some reason that’s really gotten into my writing and just been something I thought about a lot, especially as we’re coming to a point where a lot of culture in America seems to wanna shove it back in the box and shove people back in a box. And it’s sad to me. America’s a place where you should be free to be yourself and we should live and let live. It’s the idea of the country. It’s a shame that it’s getting really scary to be, like, a trans kid.
And I think the music is related to that. There’s an expressive, showy quality to it that fits these songs and fits me. I don’t know, it just feels very me. I’m not gay, but I’m an artist and I grew up weird among people who weren’t like me. Nice people, a lot of them. But I’ve always felt weird. Being crazy doesn’t help!
“Spaceman in Tulsa” has some of those themes.
It’s about people who are different from everybody else around them, or specifically it’s about people who go through some real trauma as kids, and how it can seem like there’s not a place for you in the world. And then you find art has a place for you, rock & roll. In my particular sense, it reminds me of “Mr. Jones” in some ways, which is about dying to be a rock & roll star, the celebration of becoming one, but also about the realization that it’s probably not gonna be what you’re thinking. It’s not gonna make everything OK. And in this sense, it’s about people who are going through horrific trauma, but who find a place playing rock & roll or making some kind of art. So it is a celebration in a way, ’cause you survive and you thrive, but where you come from isn’t so great necessarily.
Your singing voice has held up well over the years, which isn’t the case for everyone.
It’s a little lower for sure. I’ve lost some of the top of my range. We’ve had to lower some songs. But that happens. I do think I’m getting to be a better singer too. I just lost a few notes at the top of my range, which is natural. I’ve been on tour for 30 years now, basically.
I feel like I’m getting to be a really good singer. I hadn’t been in the studio a lot when we started this band. We had only been together a little while and I’d been in the studio a few times for Himalayans and for Counting Crows and maybe a bunch of times singing background vocals for other bands at Dave Bryson’s studio. But I had never really taken much in the way of voice lessons before the band either, and then I had to survive touring. So technically I think I kept getting better, but also just it’s a skill. You learn to use it.
But my voice has always been pretty fragile. I could do a lot of stuff with it, but it didn’t take much to wear it down. And so it got wrecked really easily. I spent a lot of time on steroids early in our career. I’m not sure why it’s not wrecked, except that I have technique, whereas I think some people have none at all.
I took some voice lessons because you go from singing once a month at home to singing on the road for months at a time. My voice gave out right away at the beginning and it was fucked. We were canceling shows or I was taking — chewing — steroids. And so I had to take some voice lessons, like emergency voice lessons, early on. Now I can’t really sing without warming up. My voice goes from not working to working. I don’t have an explanation for why it’s not shit other than, I don’t smoke anymore at all. I haven’t really for a long time. I don’t know.
I heard there’s a documentary in the works about the time between the first two albums. Is that correct?
Yeah. HBO’s doing a doc about the formation of the band and a little bit about (Recovering the) Satellites.
What’s the status of that?
I think it’s done.
And did you go back through the archives and a bunch of outtakes and stuff in the course of that?
Yeah, we did.That’s the one period during our career where we did the most filming ever. (We were) filmed while we were recording the record, and it’s really cool. And then Josh Taft, who did the live video for Pearl Jam, filmed a whole show at the Ford Theater right before we released the record, we played the whole record. Plus we did Storytellers and we did Live at the 10 Spot. So there’s a ton of live stuff. But (the filmmakers’) philosophy is you don’t want to put too much music in a documentary, ’cause it takes away from the story.
Do you think you might do something with those outtakes and stuff now that you’ve found them?
I’ve been wanting to for years. We’d been talking about putting together a box set that has more video stuff from it for Satellites. But Universal couldn’t find that stuff. They thought it was all lost. Ever since the 10th anniversary or the fifth anniversary of Satellites, we’ve been asking for that material and they said it was lost and they said it was burned in a fire and then they finally found all of it when the documentary thing came up, which I think was maybe just because they looked. But I would love to do something with it. I put that outta my mind, because I thought it would be in the documentary.
Now you’re gonna get the fans excited about this box set, though.
Maybe. Yeah. I would love to do something with all of it. It’s great stuff to me. The Storytellers thing’s never been out, with the talking.
I saw you guys on that tour. That was a great tour.
It was really fun. It was a cool year or two on the road. We have a lot of great stuff. It’d be great to put it out somehow. We will see.