In the winter of 1994, Adam Duritz was one of the biggest rock stars on the planet. He was also in the midst of a mental crisis. “When everybody loves me I will never be lonely,” he had sung on “Mr Jones”, his band Counting Crows’ smash hit single. But fame has a price tag when it comes fast and you are hiding a mental illness from the world. Kurt Cobain, Nirvana’s lead singer and Duritz’s friend, had shot himself in the head earlier that spring.
“That scared the s*** out of me,” Duritz recalls. “It taught me what could happen to me. I saw us as very similar in ways that a lot of people didn’t know. It was terrifying.”
I am talking to Duritz in the basement of a record store in London’s Denmark Street, where he is due to sign copies of Counting Crows’ latest album Butter Miracle: The Complete Sweets! Duritz, who is 61 in August and no longer sports his once signature dreadlocks, is looking forward to playing the new songs when the band return to Britain this autumn to tour. “I think I sang the s*** out of this record,” he says. “I feel like I am getting better and better as a singer.”
It is hard to overstate how famous Counting Crows were in the early 1990s. The band were signed after a major-label bidding war, and released August and Everything After in 1993. The album married a rootsy country-rock sound with Duritz’s introspectively poetic lyrics, and ended up selling more than 7 million copies in the US alone.
For a while, Duritz was everywhere: on magazine covers, dating high-profile celebrities including Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox, his dreadlocks endlessly flailing on TV. It might have looked as though Duritz was living the rock-star dream, but inside he was struggling with the intensity of fame and everyone wanting a piece of him. “There are people who really want to connect with everybody,” he says. “I’m not that guy.”
Towards the end of the world tour in support of August and Everything After, Duritz had a breakdown. Yet rather than seek therapy, he found peace by getting a bar job. He started working behind at The Viper Room, the West Hollywood celebrity bar and club that was co-owned by Johnny Depp.
“The Viper Room was much like what I imagine the Left Bank in Paris was like in the Twenties,” he says, “but instead of Hemingway and Picasso and Gertrude Stein, you had Johnny and me and Adam Ant, Tom Petty and William Burroughs. I have this memory of sitting in a booth with Johnny [Depp] and Allen Ginsberg, eating Mexican food and watching Adam Ant play, and thinking, ‘This is f***ing cool.’”
The Viper Room had a reputation for druggy hedonism – the actor River Phoenix had collapsed and died outside its doors on Halloween night in 1993 – but for Duritz it offered a sense of stability and the chance to feel part of a creative community. It inspired him to keep making music – the one thing that had always made sense since he was a young boy.
Duritz was born in Baltimore in 1964 – both parents worked in the medical field – and he spent his early years moving frequently before his family settled in Berkeley, California, when he was 10. Duritz had long been a music obsessive, but he never imagined himself as someone who could be on stage. This was partly because he was suffering from an undiagnosed dissociative disorder. “The world seems like something you’re seeing at a distance,” he explains, “like you’re watching a movie of your life going by. It’s very distancing.”
It was not until he wrote his first song, while studying English at the University of California, that he found his calling. The song was inspired by his sister and called “Good Morning, Little Sister”. “I never conceived [of having a music career] until I wrote a song,” he says, “and then I knew I was a songwriter for the rest of my life.”
Duritz continued performing with local Bay Area bands before co-founding Counting Crows with guitarist David Bryson in the early 1990s. For a while, the dreadlocks became an expression of how Duritz felt inside. “One of the weird things about dissociative disorder was the sensation of looking in a mirror and not recognising myself,” he says. “It was only when I got dreadlocks that I could look in the mirror and see myself – I looked the way I felt inside: expressive and free.”
I am a longtime fan of Counting Crows. I remember waiting outside the stage door of the Manchester Academy in November 1994 to talk to Duritz. One of the things I most love about his songs is their emotional honesty. Duritz often uses the real names of friends and past girlfriends in songs – “Mr Jones” (1993) is about Marty Jones, a bassist in Duritz’s former band; “Anna Begins” (1993) and “Goodnight Elisabeth” (1996) both refer to real people.
“To me, singing ‘Goodnight Elisabeth’, in the wake of Betsy and I splitting up, was incredibly painful and powerful,” he says, “so I used the name. I find details matter: there’s this power and resonance in description that not only grounds it for people, but means something for me.”
Duritz’s relationships provided material for some of his greatest songs, but the dissociative disorder – which was only diagnosed in 2008 – made having lasting relationships hard. “I failed at a lot of them,” he admits. “I was trying, because you’re really lonely, but dissociative disorder keeps you away from your feelings, which is what you need for a good relationship.”
I knew ‘A Long December’ was the best thing I’d ever written when I wrote it
All the same, Duritz’s gift has always been his ability to write painfully autobiographical lyrics that deeply connect with millions of people. A case in point: he had a friend who was involved a serious car accident. Duritz would visit the friend while working at The Viper Room, and it was after one late-night visit that he wrote “A Long December”, one of his finest and most beloved songs, which contains the line “the smell of hospitals in winter and the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters but no pearls”.
“I knew that was the best thing I’d ever written when I wrote it,” Duritz tells me. “I knew it was a perfect song, and I knew I was going to love playing it for ever.”
The young singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams, who hadn’t even been born when the song was first released, performed a cover of “A Long December” during the FireAid benefit concert in Los Angeles in January this year. “That was cool,” he says. “It’s a weird thing, but that song has kind of become like a Christmas standard, which is really cool. I mean, immortality is what you want.”
Duritz has been with his current girlfriend – the filmmaker Zoe Mintz – for eight years. They met on Tinder. “I hit points in my life sometimes where I don’t want to go out and I don’t want to go talk to people,” he explains. “I can be very, very shy. Sometimes it’s nice to just start off with ‘I like you, you like me, I like the way you look.’ It's not the be-all and end-all of relationships, but it’s not a bad place to start.”
This one, he says, is the best relationship he has ever had. “I’m as happy as I can imagine being,” he says. “I am actively concerned with someone else all the time, and that’s a really good feeling.”
After the massive success of their debut and the solid performance of the follow-up, Recovering the Satellites, Counting Crows found themselves adrift from the musical zeitgeist. Musical fashion changed, and the emotionally honest alt-rock sound that the band were synonymous with had given way to pop punk, hip-hop, and a more polished pop. Counting Crows continued releasing records, but by the time of Somewhere Under Wonderland (2014), Duritz was starting to lose faith in the very idea of recording albums.
“Somewhere Under Wonderland didn’t make much of an impression in the culture,” he admits, “and you don’t want to do all this work and throw it down a hole, you want people to hear your music. I want it to really matter to our fans.” He didn’t want to just go out and sing “Mr Jones” for the rest of his life, but he had lost confidence in his songwriting.
In the mid-Nineties, it was visiting The Viper Room that rescued Adam Duritz. Thirty years later, it was a visit to his friend’s farm in the English countryside. “I ended up spending a lot of time there. I was there a lot by myself, just me and a couple of dogs, and I just really loved it there.”
Duritz visited the farm before and after the pandemic, writing songs for his new LP – whose title, Butter Miracle: The Complete Sweets!, he refuses to explain. The new songs were written on either side of the pandemic, while the album is an expanded version of the four-song EP that was released four years ago.
There is no hint on the record of the doubts that preceded its recording. Instead, on the track “Spaceman in Tulsa”, Duritz calls himself a “motherf***ing rock star”. “I’ve always found the term ‘rock star’ really fun,” he says. “I always wanted to be one, and it’s hysterical to me that I am one. I’m a motherf***ing rock star, and I’ve been one for 30 years.” This risks making Duritz sound arrogant, but in person he comes across more as grateful, surprised and relieved at the trajectory of his life.
“All artists, at the beginning, are needy kids in a room with a guitar or piano, trying to connect with people,” he says. “We were just kids who didn’t know how to be ourselves, and then we find this thing we can do that other people can’t do at all, and that is how we become who we are. All these things that were inside you are not meaningless any more – they make total sense.”
‘Butter Miracle: The Complete Sweets!’ is out now
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