Counting Crows hit the global stage in 1993 with their huge debut album ‘August and Everything After’, which spawned the hits ‘Mr Jones’ and ‘Round Here’.
One of the prominent bands of the alt-rock scene, the band – fronted by songwriter and vocalist Adam Duritz – has toured the world and released seven studio albums over an almost thirty year span. Their last album was 2014’s ‘Somewhere Under Wonderland’.
Six years on from that record and Counting Crows are back with new collection ‘Butter Miracle Suite One’, a 19-minute four-track set composed as a suite. It will be released on Friday 21st May 2021.
I recently spoke to Adam Duritz about making the collection following a lengthy songwriting hiatus, discuss the challenges of putting it all together, and to discuss his thoughts on playing it live in the future…
Where did the inspiration for ‘Butter Miracle Suite One’ come from?
I hadn’t really written in a while. I just wasn’t particularly attracted to writing songs for a bit. I know myself and if I write a song, I want to record a song and I want to release it then I want to make a record. I get really feverish the moment I start writing. I think I was staying away from it for a while. I was out on my friend’s farm in the West of England and I was spending a lot of time, a lot of it completely by myself. Sometimes there were people around and sometimes my girlfriend, but a lot of it was just me and then nobody else for miles. One day I started wanting to play piano and I hadn’t had that urge in a while, maybe it was because it just me and two dogs.
I rented a keyboard in London, I had a friend drive it down one weekend, and I started playing more after that. One day I wrote ‘The Tall Grass’ and it felt good to write. I was playing it back after I thought I’d finished it and kept playing the end and repeating those chords over and over again. I switched to a different pair of chords and I sang this line off the top of my head, ‘Bobby was a kid from around the town’ and I thought ‘oh, that’s a different song. I could write a whole series of songs where the end of one is the beginning of another. That’ll be really cool, I could write a suite’.
I got really excited about it and it was the first time I wanted to write. I got really excited about writing it and then the more I wrote, the more excited I got, and the more I wanted to finish it and record it. I got really excited about what it could sound like to make something that flows like that, it seemed like a really cool idea. Music is sort of its own excuse and inspiration for me. I’ve never been a very steady or prolific writer, I’ve always just sort of written in bursts. Then I’d get really into recording and then we put a record out, and I’d get into touring and wouldn’t write much on tour, if ever, because I can’t really have a piano in my hotel room every night. I would always go chunks of time without writing and this is longer than usual. I was dealing with some other things in my life and just put music to the side for a little bit. It comes back and becomes the most important thing in the world again, it just becomes like a fever to do it.
This collection of songs has classic Counting Crows elements in there and of course your voice is iconic and instantly recognisable. I couldn’t believe how quickly the four songs whizz by when you’re listening. How did you manage to so seamlessly weave these songs together?
I really focused on that when I was writing them. Each song was inspired by the one before. “Elevator Boots’ came as I finished ‘The Tall Grass’, and I was still playing it at the end and messing around, singing seeing some different riffs and I was jamming with myself there. I just started changing chords and then that became ‘Elevator Boots’, it just sort of happened. By that time, when I finished ‘Elevated Boots’, I was looking for something else. I remember I had gone into town with one of the guys that works on the farm to get some groceries and on the way back I was listening to one of the songs on the new Bombay Bicycle Club record that came out.
I went back to find the record to see what song that was just a few months ago, it’s been a year and a half now, so I could see what it was that inspired ‘Angel of 14th Street’ and I couldn’t find anything on there that sounded anything like ‘Angel of 14th Street’, but I found a couple things that sort of sound like what I remember the song was. It was just a little bit more of a dance groove and there was a melody on the synthesizer, the bounce of it gave me this idea. I realised that ‘Angel on 14th Street’ doesn’t actually sound like whatever it was that inspired it. I’d finished ‘Elevator Boots’, I was looking for the next thing and I got this idea, and then I played the end of ‘Elevator Boots’ again and found a way into something new.
They were the inspiration for each other. Once I came up with the idea, I was very strict about that and they had to flow that way. The hard thing was when I wrote them, I recorded demos on my iPhone and I sent them to the band, and I would play the song and I would play a little bit into the next song so they could see what I meant by it. I don’t think I ever played the whole thing like that by myself on the piano. I was holding this idea in my head, explaining it to everybody but never really hearing it in reality until we finished the recording and mixed, and we cut the pieces together. It was amazing. It was everything I’d hoped it would be, it was just incredible.
When you come to the end of ‘Angel on 14th Street’ there’s that big guitar solo and I’ve always wanted to write something that people would play air guitar to, and I’ve never been that guy. I’ve never really written songs like that. When I wrote ‘Bobby and the Rat-Kings’ I just so wanted it to be a huge moment with that. The way the end of ‘Angel of 14th Street’ comes crashing down into that for the final song, it’s such a big satisfying moment. I wanted to stick my hand in the air and (scream) ‘yeah’. It was cool. I think we were listening to it in themix and i just yelled out ‘Bobby’ and we all cracked up. It was thrilling. Music should be thrilling. It should be involving and it should feel like time just passes. I can’t stand doing something for three minutes, like yoga, I can never do yoga because being in a position that hurts and just sitting there suffering for a minute, two minutes, three minutes. I can’t deal with it, it drives me crazy the time passing. It really shouldn’t work to write eight minute songs or nine minute songs or have an 19-minute suite, but it does because music is different from other things. It transports you.
When Counting Crows came up in the 90s, everything was geared to radio and artists had to consider their song lengths to get them played. Was it freeing to be able to think outside of those limits as the music landscape has changed so much?
We’ve been problematic that way from the beginning (laughs). The song that made us, ‘Mr. Jones’, was hit on the radio, but we weren’t even in the top 200. We played ‘Round Here’ on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and the record jumped 40 spots a week for five weeks. We ended up at number two for the next year and a half. To me it was a five-minute song that made us famous, in a lot of ways even ‘A Long December’ is five minutes long. The record company insisted on putting out ‘Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby’ as a single, it’s eight and a half to nine minutes long. The first single off of ‘Somewhere Under Wonderland’ is ‘Palisades Park’ and that’s nine minutes long. We’ve had a problem with radio for a really long time (laughs). In all honesty, there’s a reason singles aren’t as important to me as they are to other people sometimes because often the singles from our albums were just the only song that could fit on the radi that was short enough sometimes. It really had nothing to do with whether we thought it was the best song. ‘Angels of the Silences’ is the lead single off of ‘Recovering the Satellites’, I love that song, but part of it is just that it was short enough. Even this record, the single is just the shortest one. ‘Elevator Boots’ is catchy too but it’s the shortest song. It was the only one that could be the single because the rest are five minutes long.
It’s a shame in some respects to even have a single from ‘Butter Miracle Suite One’ because you need to hear the full album to really understand and experience it…
I didn’t think about it and we didn’t really discuss it that much. When we were recording it, we were playing it with the demos. We would play it through to the beginning of the next song for a line or two, and then we’d stop. It was only later that we thought, ‘oh, we should probably put endings on these songs because otherwise it’s going to sound really weird if it’s streaming and it just stops’. Then we went back and put endings on but we didn’t actually record them with endings except for ‘Bobby and the Rat-Kings’, which is the last song. I’ve been waiting so long for everyone to hear this and I’ve been so excited because I’m so proud of it. It kind of didn’t even occur to me that we were going to put out a single because now there’s a song out there that you’re hearing and it’s not the way it’s supposed to be heard. I think ‘Elevator Boots’ works perfectly fine alone but it’s better to hear the whole thing. This music is making an impression on people (before the EP is out) but it’s kind of in the wrong way. I’m glad that ‘Elevator Boots’ is doing really well on the radio and I’m glad, but I really cannot wait till May 21st so people can just really hear it. It’s supposed to be this thing that’s 19 minutes that shouldn’t work but it really does, and I think people will be floored when they hear it that way. I think ‘Elevator Boots’ is a great song but the fucking suite is amazing.
I’ve heard rumours that a second suite is in the works. How far along are you with that?
I thought it was a good idea but t’s just because someone asked me at one point if there was going to be a second one and I said, ‘yeah’. I would like to do a second suite so they go together. It was an afterthought. I am in the middle of writing it and I’m totally excited about doing it, but the inspiration was never about two suites. It was about this suite. When it turned out like it turned out, I did get excited about doing another one. I’ve answered the question yes to people but it’s unrelated. It’s not like we have two suites and we’re releasing them one at a time. We have one suite and one not suite (laughs).
You must be really excited to get back out on the road and play these songs live. Have you thought about how you’ll incorporate the suite into a set and will it be played complete from start to finish?
That’s what I think we’d like to do. I don’t think we’ll open shows with it and I think I’ll probably keep it out of the encore too, but I would like to have in the middle, the same way we break for acoustic sets sometimes, I’d like to play it that way. It’s weird because we’ve never played it either. We’ve never played the whole thing. When we started this record, we started it with just five of us. My idea was always that we record this record, get everything kind of down, and then we’d bring the other two guitar players in so we didn’t have to start recording with three guitar players because that can be really chaotic. We did two weeks in the studio and then we were taking a two-week break and the guitar players were going to come in for four days and lay all the other guitar parts. The pandemic hit right on the break and we were stuck. We eventually had those guys record their parts at home, one of them has a studio in his house, another has a friend next door with a studio, so they did that and sent it into us. We finished it here in July. Our producer drove in from Chicago so he wouldn’t have to fly, we all stayed at my house and I cooked for everybody, and we just got a studio two blocks away so we could lay those guitars in and mix it. So we’ve never even played it. We do a lot of recording with the whole band playing at once and then we’ll go back and pick stuff out of it, but we most of the time, we’ve played the songs all together before we record them, and while we’re recording. It at least begins that way, even if people go back and overdub; it always starts all together but not this one. We’ve never even played it together so that’ll take some rehearsal.
My friend Dave Drago, he’s a producer and he has a place up in northern New York up in Rochester, and he produced some stuff for my friend Sean Barna and the album a couple years ago that I sang on called ‘Sissy’. He did all the background vocals on ‘Sissy’ except the ones I sang. I thought they were so cool. They gave me this glam feel like Mott the Hoople and early Bowie, and I really loved them. When we hit that break and got stuck in the pandemic, I called him up and I said, ‘look, I’ve been thinking a lot. We don’t have a ton of good ideas for background vocals, we have few that are pretty cool but I’m gonna send you the record’. He and I over the month of maybe April into May, just back and forth over the phone and over Zoom, did all the background vocals for the record. He sang 90% of the background vocals himself and he composed them. It was a huge part of this record and I think it’s a big part of the flavour of the record that work he did. We have to learn those two. It’s gonna be a real big challenge to play it. That’s kind of cool. That was the best part about ‘Palisades Park’, was realising how difficult it was going to be. It was difficult in the studio too because I had to conduct while we were playing with no click track. ‘Palisades Park’ was really cool, and still is such a challenge to play live that I really enjoy it and I’m hoping that these will be like that, but it’s definitely gonna take some work because it’s a it’s a complex thing.
I’m looking forward to you being able to play the whole thing live here in the UK. I think in the middle of the set sounds like it would work really well…
I’m really excited about it. It’s hard to get people to listen to new music too. I’m hoping also, as good as this record is doing at radio, that it really catches on with people so that we can play concerts and people want to hear 20 minutes of something. I mean, I’m playing it either way (laughs) but it’d be nicer for them if they actually are interested.
Well you know from your time here that UK audiences love to listen so it’s going to go down a storm here…
Yeah, I think so. We’ve always had great shows there. It’s so exciting for a band to go overseas and play. The first time we got to England was in April of ’94. We’ve played everywhere there, but it’s fucking exciting to know that you’re at Wembley, and you’re playing Wembley. I mean, it’s not the outdoor one but still, it’s fucking exciting, you know?
Counting Crows release ‘Butter Miracle Suite One’ on Friday 21st May 2021. Watch the video for ‘Elevator Boots’ below:
