Adam Duritz of Counting Crows Never Sings a Song the Same Way Twice

Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz says he used to write songs all the time. But following the release of the band’s 1993 debut, August and Everything After, his output slowed down.

“I had no choice,” Duritz says. "We were spending a year and a half on the road...and I can't really write on the road because I don't play guitar. I play piano, and there's no way to bring a piano into your hotel room.”

Sometimes Duritz would go for years without writing songs.

“I don't write steadily,” he says. “I was never one of those guys who writes for a few years, has thirty songs and then picks ten.”

Following the release of 2014’s Somewhere Under Wonderland, Duritz took a five-year hiatus from writing until the summer of 2019, when he was visiting a friend’s farm in England and got the urge to play piano again. So he rented a keyboard. For most of his life, Duritz has lived with a dissociative order that can affect his memory, and if he goes long periods without touching a keyboard, it’s almost as though he has to relearn the instrument.

“It certainly has kept me from getting very good,” Duritz says. “I tend to discover things by poking around and figuring out what they are and finding something that sounds cool. I think it'd be much better if I was just really good; I could play whatever I wanted to play.”

A few days after renting a keyboard and staying at the farm, the song “The Tall Grass” came to him. While writing its end, Duritz found that it segued effortlessly into “Elevator Boots,” which he says was more complex compositionally, since his piano playing had improved over a few days. And his skills increased even more by the time he wrote “Angel of 14th Street” and “Bobby in the Rat-Kings.”

The four songs each flow into each other seamlessly on Butter Miracle Suite One, the album that Counting Crows released last May. On the band’s current tour in support of the project, which stops at the Fillmore Auditorium on Tuesday, August 24, Duritz and company have been incorporating the EP’s four songs into its sets alongside tracks from other albums in the band’s three-decade-long history.

Since Counting Crows formed in 1991, Duritz has written about ghosts as a metaphor for memories, like “Ghost Train,” from August and Everything After, which he says is “about how your memories are like a train of ghosts that gets longer and longer as you live. And Hard Candy was an entire album about memories.

“I think that a big theme in my writing is the way in which our childhood and our past is this thing we lug around for the rest of our lives,” Duritz says. “Your memories and the things you grew up with, they're like these ghosts that haunt you and can be like burdens that you lug around your whole life, fucking up or determining your future so much.

“We have so much trouble releasing ourselves from the burden of our childhood," he continues. "It is such a determining factor in how we live our lives, both for better and for worse. And I think that's been a theme that runs through so many of my songs — how our memories stick with us in good and bad ways.”

He continues exploring the theme on songs from Butter Miracle Suite One, like “Angel of 14th Street” or in “The Tall Grass,” in the line: “There are some of us get broken when we're children / And you never get it back once that is gone.”

“Bobby and the Rat-Kings,” which musically is a nod to vintage Bruce Springsteen & the E-Street Band, is about how music is a touchstone for the song’s narrator, exploring “how the all the memories with this fictional band provided the soundtrack for his life the way so many provided the soundtrack for mine,” Duritz says.

Whichever songs he sings on this current tour, Duritz notes that they can all take on different meanings to him each night.

“I'm in a different mood every different night at a concert,” he explains. “Some nights I'm excited and energetic. Some nights I'm sad. Some nights I'm frustrated. Some nights I'm angry. Some nights it's just funny. All those things you bring with you to the song each night and that may determine the songs you choose to play that night. And it'll certainly also determine how they come out, if you let it.

“You can also choose not to do it that way," he concludes. "You can just re-create the record — but I've never been particularly interested in that. Also, it's just really cool to me that they're living things. A song is something you can re-experience in a different way every day."

Counting Crows plays with Matt Sucich and Sean Barna at 6 p.m. Tuesday, August 25, at the Fillmore Auditorium, 1510 Clarkson Street, $59-$99.