Counting Crows will play live in the UK for the first time in four years when they hit these shores to play six shows, beginning on the 19th April in Birmingham. Preceding that welcome UK tour will be the release of ‘Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow’, a collection of live songs recorded over several dates of the band’s 2012 North American tour, on 8th April through Cooking Vinyl.

 

I caught up with the band’s frontman, Adam Duritz, to ask about the forthcoming UK tour, the band’s last album, ‘Underwater Sunshine’, and just how the band manages to pick a different live setlist every night…..

 

With ‘Underwater Sunshine’ I feel that you took some risks in recording your interpretations of newer/obscure artists rather than the usual covers. Was there any criteria for choosing the songs?

 

It was just looking for songs we love, that we could give our own take on, we weren’t looking intentionally for only obscure songs. There is so much great music out there. If you’re really into music, you probably turn up with a lot of songs that people wouldn’t know. There are a lot of actors out there who say this film sucks, or this director is terrible. But all musicians and music fans wanna do is shove the latest great thing they’ve found. It kinda the total opposite. The coolest thing you can do on any given day is show someone else is a great piece of music. So the way the songs turned out on the record wasn’t intentional at all.

 

With that in mind, I read that you were working on ‘Local Boy In The Photograph’ by Stereophonics but it never made the grade. Are there any other songs you wish in hindsight that you recorded, or unhappy that some songs didn’t make the release?

 

That song was only left off as we didn’t finish it. I thought ‘Local Boy…’ was going to be really good. But we were only in the studio for like 10 or 12 days of actual recording time. It was pretty quick, we did a really cool version of it, my only worry was that it started to sound too much like the original, and we wanted it to have a bit more uniqueness about it. So basically we hadn’t finished it. I love that song, it’s a great song. I’m huge fan of the Stereophonics. We were on the Jools Holland together, right when they released their first record. And they played ‘More Life In A Tramp’s Vest’ and we were on the same time. I got to know them when they first starting out. I got to know Kelly really well. He opened up for is in London unannounced, we just didn’t tell anybody we had Kelly open the show. I just walked out on stage and said, “Let me introduce to you the Real Mr. Jones,” and Kelly done a acoustic set for us.

 

Having seen you live on each of your UK tours, a special show for me was the ‘Hard Candy’ Cardiff show where you told the audience that you were going to do something different that night and played a lot of songs acoustically. For me that made night ever more special – Do you still like to mix the set up to keep things fresh?

 

Yeah, we haven’t done a straight acoustic show in a while. The set list changes every night – I usually send a text out after soundcheck or dinner to the band and the crew that says anything you wanna play or hear tonight and then I hear back from everybody, and then I make a set list up from the suggestions off everybody. So we’re in the flow every night.

 

Another great concert for me was the first time I saw you in November 1994 (on my 19th birthday) and you didn’t play ‘Mr. Jones’ which a few fans were not happy with – I thought that it was ballsy move and almost a punk thing for a band as big as Counting Crows to do, and I loved you even more for not playing it! Are there moments when you wish you could do a full set of completely new songs that nobody had even heard?

 

Well I mean, we don’t play ‘Mr. Jones’ on any number of nights. That’s the thing about the set list, There’s nothing sacred. I feel you owe an audience a passionate, professional performance. But we don’t have any particular songs though. There’s one thing that I don’t wanna do is play songs I don’t wanna play. The surest way of not liking playing live is to play songs you don’t wanna play over and over again.  So to me I love ‘Mr. Jones’, I think it’s a great song, although I won’t play it if I don’t wanna play it. I don’t wanna start hating my own songs. There’s no song to me that is sacred. There’s not anything that deserves that every night. The closest anything came over the last year was ‘Untitled (Love Song)’ on ‘Underwater Sunshine’, which I released at the end of the summer, that we pretty much played it every night. So I yanked it from the set.

 

With your lyrics being so emotional and yet expressive do you find it harder to write now or are you still inspired by everything around you?

 

It’s different and more to do with me trying to be less crazy this past year. Just work through my own crazy difficulties.

 

With a new live album due for release to coincide with the UK tour, will there be any surprises on the album, i.e. any songs that haven’t been played live before or at least in a very long time, or is it a straight recording from one show?

 

No, we taped a whole bunch of shows. That’s what the best live music has. I just finished the mixing last night and I was up so late and the engineer called me in the middle of the night and said, “it’s too long, it’s four minutes too long, you have to cut a song” and I thought I done the math on this and I was really happy with it and I spent like 2 hours on it thinking over and over again about what song to cut and finally I decided to cut my favourite song which bummed me out; it is this great version of ‘Carriage’ which has Andre Carte on trumpet on it from DC and it’s beautiful. So I decided to cut and then like two hours later I woke up and looked at my emails and saw that (the engineer) said he got the math wrong, as I added a song that you cut last week. And I was like you asshole, I just spend like two hours agonising over which song to pull and it turned out that I didn’t even need to.

 

There’s also a great version of ‘Rain King’ on there which, you know that band Elbow? I really love that song ‘Lippy Kids’ and for some reason in the middle of the show, as the day before I saw this cool video of the band in the studio in London playing ‘Lippy Kids’, I suddenly went into ‘Lippy Kids’ in the middle of ‘Rain King’ and that’s really cool.

 

It’s not the most ‘Hits’ filled set and I’m not sure they are obscure, as they’re just our songs. There’s stuff like ‘Sundays’ and a great version of ‘Mercury’ in there. ‘Le Ballet D’Or’, ‘Four Days’,  a lot of those songs in there.

 

Going back to February 2011 and the release of your ‘All My Bloody Valentines’ album, I saw this as a taster for what was to come with ‘Underwater Sunshine’. However what I love about the recording is the rawness of the sound and the emotion coming from your voice. What was the inspiration behind the release?

 

It was just really that I woke a week before Valentine’s Day bummed out because my girlfriend and I broke out a month before that and just thought Shit, I don’t wanna sit around for a full week moping with Valentine’s Day coming out so I got taught myself how to play that Steve Earle song ‘Valentine Day’ and then recorded it like with my computer with a two track and put it up online and then I thought I’m gonna learn a song every day for a week and record it andthen put it up online – I did it to give myself something to do for a week. But at the end of it some guy wrote “Wow, you’ve got a whole record. What are you going to call it?” So I joked and said “I’ll call it ‘All My Bloody Valentines.” Then five minutes later someone posted a mock up of a cover and I thought, “that’s cool!” So there was no planning at all. I just spent all night learning to play these songs and then record them in the day and this went on for a week. It was a total accidental record.

 

In a couple of years your second album ‘Recovering The Satellites’ will be reaching its 20th Anniversary. Are there any plans to celebrate what I think is one of your most honest and introspective releases?

 

There’s a lot of stuff we have, but I’ve been trying to find it for the last couple of years. There’s the documentary that was made by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris who directed Little Miss Sunshine and they filmed us while recording the album. There was the first concert of the entire record at the Ford Theatre. Live at the 10 Spot, Hammerstein Ballroom, New York and then the ‘Storytellers’. So there is loads of stuff and I would love to put together a deluxe package of all that stuff in it. That album is worth a re-look even before the anniversary. It’s a real growth record and we became a band. So it’s a big deal to me.

 

Can you look in the mirror and say that you are happy with the Adam Duritz that you see today?

 

No, I’m tired of being crazy. I just kinda wish my brain worked better.

 

Are you looking forward to coming back to the UK after four years away?

 

I love playing the UK and coming over to England is always special. It’s the first place we ever went to our international tour. It was a big deal and for me going to England was the reverse Beatles thing. The famous Rock N Roll thing with the Beatles coming to New York and playing on Ed Sullivan and for me going to England was the opposite. When we got there on the first tour we got into London, we went to see a midnight showing of Backbeat which had just come out and was really cool. We were in Leicester Square for a midnight showing about a rock ‘n’ roll band on the road for the first time and that. It always stuck in my head and England is pretty cool that way.

 

And to finish anything you would like to say to your fans about the tour?

 

Please come early as the woman who’s playing us with – Lucy Rose – is a great singer and we’re very lucky to have her on tour with us.

 

Counting Crows UK dates:

 

APRIL 2013
Fri 19th Birmingham O2 Academy
Sat 20th Bristol Colston Hall
Mon 22nd London Hammersmith Apollo
Tue 23rd London Hammersmith Apollo
Thu 25th Manchester O2 Apollo Manchester
Fri 26th Glasgow O2 Academy

 

Tickets are £33.50 adv Reg / £36.50 Bristol / £37.50 London (all subject to booking fee). Online tickets available from http://www.ticketmaster.co.uk or http://www.livenation.co.uk

 

[Photo kudos to Danny Clinch]

 

www.countingcrows.com