Counting Crows

It’s been a while since Counting Crows hit fans with new material. The band’s last full-length studio effort was 2014’s “Somewhere Under Wonderland.” In the 11 years since, the band toured, performed with the London Symphony Orchestra and released a freshly recorded 2019 version of “August and Everything After,” the here-to-for unreleased title cut from the album of the same name.

Throw in a global pandemic, and the only new music Counting Crows fans could sink their teeth into was the 2021 EP, “Butter Miracle, Suite One,” which featured a four-song suite influenced by the likes of Mott the Hoople, Thin Lizzy and Seán Barna’s album “CISSY.” Vocalist and founding member Adam Duritz will be the first to admit his band has been forced to rethink the paradigm into which the music industry has evolved.

“For awhile I wasn’t really sure how to put out records,” Duritz admitted in a mid-May interview. “With ‘Somewhere Under Wonderland,’ we had a great record company who did a really good job [promoting it] and the album just kind of disappeared. I wanted to take some time to find out what it was we were doing wrong in putting out records, because we’re not the center of the culture anymore. We had to figure out the process a little better, and I felt like we didn’t really have a handle on that. Just putting it out and working it on radio is not really a fully imagined way to release records nowadays. I just kind of felt like I wanted to figure out how to do this. It’s hard to work really hard on the music and then feel like you’re throwing it down a hole.”

The four songs that made up “Butter Miracle, Suite One” — “The Tall Grass,” “Elevator Boots,” “Angel of 14th Street,” “Bobby and the Rat-Kings” — served as a baseline for the band’s next full-length. After recording five new songs last spring prior to leaving for a summer tour, Duritz and his compatriots came away with the newly released “Butter Miracle! The Complete Sweets,” Counting Crows’ eighth full-length studio album. And while the whole project took nearly four years to complete, the 60-year-old vocalist was thrilled with the chemistry he and his bandmates had during the recording process.

“The time in the studio was really good,” Duritz said with a smile. “We were just playing so well, and it was so easy. My two favorite moments were hearing the whole thing when it was finally done and also the day we mixed ‘Bobby and the Rat Kings’ and cut the whole suite together. Up until that point, we didn’t know if it would work. It’s a weird thing when you’re recording and working on songs one by one, you kind of know they work. With a suite like this, no matter how well it was turning out in the studio, there was a question as to whether it was going to fit together and flow the way we wanted it to. It was composed and written to do that, but you still don’t know if it’s going to until the day you stitch it all together and there it goes. That was one of the most creative days of my life honestly. The whole suite was such an ambitious attempt for us and it was so satisfying when it worked.”

While the pace of putting out eight albums over the 34-years-and-counting lifespan of the band may not be particularly prolific, the live side of the coin has always been a robust facet for Counting Crows. And with such an enterprising slate of new songs to play, Duritz is looking forward to throwing the newest songs into the mix along with tackling the challenge of playing the four-song suite this summer.

“On our last tour, we played the whole thing as one,” Duritz recalled. “I really love the suite. I never really tried one song alone, but to me, ‘Elevator Boots’ doesn’t feel as great alone. It’s really powerful coming out of ‘The Tall Grass.’ It’s not as much of a cool thing when you just play the one song.”

He added, “But I think it’s going to be exciting because we have all these new songs that really rock. I’m really excited to play them. We played ‘Spaceman in Tulsa’ a few times now. We’ve opened with it for a few shows, and it was great. We’ve played ‘With Love, From A-Z, and that’s really cool live. We did it at this festival a couple of weeks ago. And on the radio over in England, Immer [multi-instrumentalist David Immerglück] and I did ‘Virginia Through the Rain’ as a duet and that was really, really cool as well.”

With three-plus decades in the books, Counting Crows could have easily collapsed under the weight of hype that found them at the center of a major label bidding war back in February 1992. As an unknown outfit, the Bay area quintet filled in for Van Morrison at the 1993 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, and their 1993 debut “August and Everything After” became at the time the fastest-selling record since Nirvana’s “Nevermind.”

And while Duritz’s love life with paramours including Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox and Mary Louise Parker made him tabloid fodder, inter-band conflict and drama never seemed to enter the orbit of the band, whose lineup has had only two member changes. Duritz says the stability wasn’t accidental and that he’s been perfectly happy to ensure that harmony, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, has been the fuel that keeps his band going.

“I can only really speak for me, but I realized early on that I loved being in this band, and this is what I’d always wanted for my life,” Duritz said. “I think you see bands that break up all the time, and a lot of it is because there’s always a way for anyone in any band to figure out why they deserve more. More attention, more respect, more money — whatever it is. There’s always a way for everybody in every band to feel slighted. But you’ve got to figure out what’s important, and I think I realized early on that this band was what I’d always been looking for, so I just made that the priority. For me, it was always about these guys and all of us and how to make it good for all of us. You may deserve more, but if there’s not enough for everybody else, you don’t have a band.”

He paused before saying, “Regardless of how everyone might think that Counting Crows is all about me in a lot of ways, all I do as a songwriter is write some chords and words — that’s not really a song. My songs really need these guys because what makes them come across so powerfully and so emotionally is how well they play them. If I was just a solo artist, it just wouldn’t be that good. It’s really about those guys, and I’ve known that forever. Even if nobody else knows that, I know that.”

Counting Crows
Tue., Aug. 19, 6:30pm
Hayden Homes Amphitheater
344 SW Shevlin Hixon Dr., Bend
bendconcerts.com/events
$67.20+