Counting Crows - A return to their roots

To My Grandmother

Alongside Cracker, Better Than Ezra and Wallflowers, Counting Crows were among the standard-bearers of the restoration, having revived that typically American "classic" rock, a crossbreed of folk, blues and country traditions whose genesis owes to artists such as Bob Dylan, The Band, Little Feat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Byrds, Van Morrison. The Counting Crows sound, duly modernized by the rhythmic neuroses of R.E.M. and by the depressive-existential mood typical of the Nineties, presents itself as a quality alternative for that middle-class audience looking for stories of ordinary desperation to identify with, without having to "dirty" their ears with the metallic paroxysms of grunge. These are narratives for that portion of Generation X willing to torment itself, but not too much, to grow sad but not to flagellate itself, for that segment raised on "Beverly Hills 90210" and "Friends", pseudo-alternative in its ideals, capable of generically criticizing capitalist society while standing in line at McDonald's.

Counting Crows are champions of a radio-friendly sound, bringing into play various traditional instruments such as organ, mandolin and harmonica; a rural orchestra, in short, in the best tradition of The Band. It is precisely these elements, along with a decent flair for arrangement, that allow the band to keep its distance from the sonic aberrations (shamelessly mainstream) of Collective Soul and Hootie and the Blowfish, purveyors of a sound polished beyond belief and devoid of sincerity. Counting Crows' roots rock is ennobled by Charlie Gillingham's atmospheric organ, but above all by the penetrating - even before romantic - voice of Adam Duritz, a bastard synthesis of Van Morrison's soul passion and the emphatic inflections of Bono Vox and Grant Lee Phillips. And this is precisely the secret of Duritz: unpacking stories of desperation with heartfelt magniloquence, thereby reviving the myth of the "beautiful loser". A songwriter of real worth, Duritz tells the everyday dramas of ordinary people. Amid tormented love affairs, escapes, skeletons in the closet and shattered dreams, the singer-songwriter builds a body of work that best captures the life of young people in small-town America.

Coming from San Francisco, Counting Crows released, in 1993, August And Everything After, one of the great masterpieces of "alternative mainstream" in the Nineties. The album would sell by the truckload, propelled by the massive hit "Mr. Jones", in heavy rotation for a long stretch, and by a series of catchy tracks that tell stories brimming with sincerity, and therefore marketable without being shamelessly commercial; AOR, yes, but classy AOR. A portrait of a restless generation in perpetual search of a purpose is the desperate "Round Here", one of the finest songs of the decade: “Then she looks up at the building/ and say’s she’s thinking of jumping/ She say’s she’s tired of life/ she must be tired of something”, sings Duritz in a style that sounds like the weeping of a sinner on the road to redemption. "Omaha" sounds as if it stepped straight out of "Music From Big Pink", managing to evoke that small-town, rural America, genuine and a little naive. "Mr. Jones" skillfully revives the magic of the Byrds with an obsessive yet melodic jangling guitar jingle; guitar, bass and drums are entirely at the service of producing rhythm, somewhat in the manner of Talking Heads, while the soloing is left to Duritz's voice alone. His maturity as a singer is striking, as shown by "Time And Time Again", a touching portrayal of a dying lover, set within a precious psychedelic arrangement courtesy of Gillingham's organ. More sparkling folk pop comes with "Rain King", more R.E.M. than Byrds, in the wake of "Mr Jones".

Nothing new under the sun, but these songs have the ability to pierce the human soul because they are gracefully melodious, and to unsettle it by virtue of the tormented stories they tell. "Sullivan Street" is a poignant Byrds-style ballad with female backing vocals, piano instilling a sad autumnal melody, and Duritz's intimate confessions, crafting with the skill of a seasoned actor yet another story of ordinary self-flagellation. The album's masterpiece is perhaps "Raining In Baltimore", a slow pianistic elegy with the cinematic quality of freezing time while Duritz waits to answer the questions that torment him. "August And Everything After" is a small gem of intimism, skilled at describing the cultural humus that produced it, at times rhetorical, but certainly sincere. A small-town storyteller like Westerberg, a nostalgic poet like Isaak, a passionate rocker like Springsteen, Duritz is the romantic alter ego of Cobain; the desperate scream of the Nirvana frontman expresses the iconoclastic fury of a generation, apathetic and resigned before a society that does not understand it. A display of raging unrest that moves from the inside (the soul) outward (society). Duritz's characters, by contrast, metabolize the dramas in which they are protagonists, tormenting themselves inwardly, in a discreet and self-pitying manner.

This Desert Life is produced by David Lowery (of Cracker, and formerly of the brilliant Camper Van Beethoven). Dave McKean's illustrations in the booklet would be worth the price of the CD on their own, but the music doesn't disappoint either. The atmospheres feel airier and the mood less restless, while the lyrics are more cryptic. The sound is perfectly balanced between acoustic structures, electric inserts and string arrangements. The Band once again becomes Crows' main point of reference, as shown by the rustic romp "St. Robinson In His Cadillac Dream". The sturdiest southern rock, meanwhile, is invoked on "Hanginaround", a dynamic uptempo number where piano chords set the pace. Piano is again prominent on "Amy Hit The Atmosphere", melancholic and psychedelic thanks to Dan Vickrey's sitar, while "Four Days" is R.E.M.-style power folk. "All My Friends" perfectly captures the melancholy condition of so many thirty-somethings still behaving like kids, unable to grow into men, trapped in their own state by a counterproductive urge toward self-pity: “All my friends and lovers leave me behind/ I’m still looking for a girl/ One way or another/ I’m just doping to find a way/ to put my feet out in the world”. A masterpiece of dramatic art are the 3 minutes and 23 seconds of "Colorblind", where Duritz's piano paints a sad atmosphere that is, at the same time, charged with tension, as in the finest compositions of Nick Cave.

Less urgent and spontaneous than August And Everything After, This Desert Life surpasses its predecessor in quality and in the quality of its arrangements.

Hardy Candy is a pop record that fits comfortably into commercial radio playlists, partly due to (or thanks to?!) a more optimistic mood. The more upbeat compositions are all offspring of the Byrds' power folk, cleaned up, smoothed over in the arrangements and coated with a patina of melancholy that, in this case, feels artificial. Duritz wallows in self-pity as per cliché, turning by now into a simulacrum of himself; pub music, or worse, supermarket music. Crows' sound has always gone hand in hand with the mainstream, but until now we credited them with a sincerity and expressive urgency that made them appreciable even to the more alternative fringes of the music audience. Having lost these qualities, the band risks being filed alongside the likes of Creed, (late-period) Aerosmith, (late-period) U2 and assorted nu-metal acts. The vulgarization of the Byrds' sound is blatant on the title track, lightweight (and that's not a compliment) with a fawning jingle-jangle that would suit a cellphone commercial just fine. "American Girls" does even worse, with over-glossy arrangements and saccharine background vocals. "Goodnight L.A." is a copy of "Amy Hit The Atmosphere", but considerably more boring. In its rhythms and vocal delivery, "New Frontier" even sounds like it came straight out of the Police's "Regatta De Blanc".

Bad songs abound, but amid so much mediocrity Duritz still manages to paint a couple of numbers worthy of his name, such as the slow, poignant and psychedelic "Good Time" and the splendid "Butterfly In Reverse", draped in a gorgeous string arrangement. Counting Crows give the impression of being spent; it is now up to them to decide whether to keep sailing the golden seas of the mainstream, or to try something different. Counting Crows can undoubtedly write songs, but theirs is an anachronistic sound, too derivative of its reference points, incapable by its very nature of renewing itself. Anyone looking for a modern, forward-thinking roots rock that doesn't sacrifice the legacy of the great masters of American songwriting can turn instead to Calexico, Califone and Wilco.

Six years of relative silence then follow, interrupted only by a "Best Of" and by one song ("Accidentally In Love") for the soundtrack of the animated film "Shrek 2" (2004), which brought them back to the top of the American charts and earned them an Oscar nomination, plus a decent live album released in 2006. In between, general turmoil: rumors of the band splitting up, of a solo project by frontman Adam Duritz, the unsettling specter of a collaboration with pop starlet Mandy Moore, and then the actual departure from the group of longtime bassist Matt Malley (reportedly over "political" differences).

The release of a new album seemed, in the end, almost a contractual obligation, but surprisingly Counting Crows put together their best set of songs since the distant days of August And Everything After (1993).

Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, as the album is titled, is an ambitious concept split in two, about Los Angeles' unbridled nightlife and the hangovers and bitterness of the mornings after the "high". The album best represents the band's two souls, the straightforward rock one and the more traditional, folk one, akin to Bob Dylan and Van Morrison.

"Saturday Nights", the rockier half, is produced by Gil Norton (producer of Pixies, Foo Fighters and a hundred others, who had already worked with the band on Recovering The Satellites), and it opens in grand style with "1492", in its own way one of the band's angriest tracks. Then there's "Hanging Tree", a perfect power-pop song, the The Band-style ballad "Los Angeles", a genuine declaration of love for the city of angels, written and performed together with friend Ryan Adams, the instantly grabbing midtempo of "Sundays", the anguished "Insignificant", perhaps the loveliest track on the record, and finally the rambling "Cowboys" (the least convincing), which closes out this first part of the album.

The night is already over, it's time for the "Sunday Mornings" announced by the title. This second part of the album is entrusted to the velvety production of Brian Deck (Iron & Wine, Califone), and is more relaxed, more intimate (many tracks feature just guitar, piano and voice), to the point that it almost feels like a personal Duritz project, with the rest of the band staying in the background, popping up now and then (as on the single "You Can't Count On Me" which, like so much of Crows' catalogue, tells of a love gone wrong). "Washington Square", with its harmonica solo just before the finale, delivers real emotion, and the closing, elegiac "Come Around" is a heartfelt reckoning with the band's nearly twenty years of activity. In between, there's a bit too much filler, like the tedious "On a Tuesday in Amsterdam Long Ago", which aspires to be the new "Raining In Baltimore", or the mannered "When I Dream Of Michelangelo", but ultimately nothing to complain about too much.

Most will object that Counting Crows offer nothing original, that they've been doing the same thing for years (and indeed, once again American critics have turned up their noses), but putting out an album so "out of time", so solidly anchored in American tradition, is such a countercurrent move that it deserves respect.

In 2012 Counting Crows walked away from the platinum-plated world of major labels and self-released an entire album of covers, Underwater Sunshine. Fifteen deeply Counting Crows-ified versions of songs plucked from the more or less recent past of American and British pop and rock. Some of the names are huge (Bob Dylan, Big Star), others intriguing (Teenage Fanclub, Travis), others still nearly unknown (who on earth are Sordid Humor? Old friends of Duritz's). Say what you will, the band has taste, and the ability to get inside the spirit of songs written ten, twenty, forty years ago on one side of the world or the other: take those concentrated doses of melancholy that are Kasey Anderson & the Honkies' "Like Teenage Gravity" or Travis' "Coming Around" (not to mention the Tender Mercies' "Four White Stallions", already present, with a few differences, as a bonus track on Hard Candy), or the sparkling country of Pure Prairie League's "Amie", or the dark plunge of Sordid Humor's "Jumpin Jesus". And it turns out, too, that we'd struggle to grow tired of Duritz's liquid voice, that gorgeous mixed-blood voice of his, no matter what we gave it to sing, and that we could probably keep needing these big, full guitars, these piano runs, this epic, sentimental, perpetual return to the source for a good while longer, even if only once in a while.

In 2014 the Californian band churned out the sixth chapter of a discography that, all things considered, is fairly slim. And yet Somewhere Under Wonderland is a good record. Nothing new under the sky of Greenwich Village, the tallest sky in New York, where Duritz now tends to spend most of his time. Good old folk-rock saturated with big guitars and melancholy piano runs, nine well-crafted songs. They're small narratives capable of throwing open the doors to Duritz's boundless imagination. The America of a billion miles of road, the America of abandoned amusement parks and dusty porches, the America that devours the soul and memory. The America of showbiz in which Counting Crows, and their frontman above all, have inevitably found themselves entangled at certain points in their career. Duritz used to sing about his eschatological torments as a young man — imagine that now, at fifty: is this really the path he was meant to take, or is there something better on the other side of his Rio Grande?

Then, of course, there's the music, and at least three or four tracks stand out fairly clearly from the rest: the electric "Dislocation", the reassuring country-rock of "Cover Up The Sun", the hypnotic "John Appleseed's Lament" in which the inevitable Maria makes an appearance, and also the never-ending "Palisades Park" that opens the record, eight minutes of a slow run backwards through time and a simple question repeated endlessly that ends up echoing and echoing deep within each of us: "Hey man, have you seen Andy? Have you seen my Andy".

The band returned in 2021 with Butter Miracle, Suite One, a suite of just 30 minutes, split into four tracks and accompanied by a statement that sounds more like a hope than a promise: "I'm writing the second part," declared Adam Duritz, the band's leader and a leading figure of that Generation X which, in the mid-Nineties, was willing to tear its heart out, but not its veins, and certainly not its eardrums.

The shearing of his notorious dreadlocks during the pandemic marked an existential turning point for a Duritz on the threshold of his sixties, who discovered — in his own words — that there's something else out there besides music, like having a lasting relationship with a woman he loves. Rather ironic that this epiphany led Duritz straight back to writing new music. The story goes that this unpredictable gestation was helped along by an extended stay at friends' farm in England, where the songwriter suddenly felt the need to have a keyboard brought to him, letting inspiration drift from his head onto paper by way of his fingers.

In 2021 this circle of friends (largely unchanged over the years) was joined by Brian Deck, who had previously produced Modest Mouse and Iron & Wine. And who knows if it isn't his touch behind the unusual, featherlight breath of electronic sounds that drifts through "The Tall Grass", the opening track — and best moment — of Butter Miracle, Suite One, in which Duritz's voice — deep and strangely hoarse — makes its way forward with an uncertain, almost mysterious gait over suspended minor-seventh chords, up to the melodic shift that recalls the electric, dusty Recovering The Satellites and reminds everyone of Duritz's ability to fuse music and words into a single substance ("I have one eye open to the rain/and one pressed to the ground again").

Moving seamlessly from the first track into the second is a bit like stepping out of the house into the garden; "Elevator Boots" sings of a love for rock with a sound that edges close to the Crows of their most recent period, but it comes off as an inferior copy of "Palisades Park". The irregular, poetic "Angel of 14th Street", torn open by a trumpet solo and a guitar solo (the latter following in the footsteps of the mood already painted by the lovely "Cowboys" from Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings) introduces the final part of the suite, "Bobby and the Rat-Kings", which acts as a conceptual counterpoint to the aforementioned "Elevator Boots" with another heartfelt love letter addressed to rock'n'roll, this time from the opposite sender: the fan rather than the artist.

The final song of "Butter Miracle, Suite One" winks at The Who and finds Duritz drifting off on his own in a Van Morrison-esque style, before rejoining the rest of the band for the final embrace ("when the Rat-Kings go away/we'll never be the same again/again/oh, again/oh, again/again", lyrics that weave a hidden thread back to the old "Einstein On The Beach (for an Eggman)": "No, never be together again/no no, never never never again").

Labels aside, it's hard to consider Counting Crows' latest album a true suite. Each song retains its own independence, and barring the medley format — which leaves no room for breaks between one track and the next — the EP doesn't carry a unified message or narrative (indeed, every track was also released as a single edit). To be fair, the record's release was accompanied by a short film that lays bare the story of a rock star torn between writer's block and the bittersweet memories of a distant past, but it's a separate product layered on top of the music, one that lives a life of its own.

The hope is that the second part of the suite will reveal the meaning of a work that otherwise feels blunted, and ultimately sounds like a sparse collection of new songs that come across as copies of ones Counting Crows had already recorded in a more or less glorious, more or less recent past.

In 2025, however, the release of "Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!" fails to resolve the doubts left open by the previous record.

Ultimately, after their excellent folk-rock debut in 1993, Counting Crows, with "Recovering The Satellites" and the underrated "This Desert Life", gradually veered toward a more electric rock sound, while still keeping intact that poetic, melancholy, romantic streak that has always been the stylistic signature of Adam Duritz, voice and soul of the Californian band. Though fresh, catchy and superbly produced, "Hard Candy" marked the record of change for Counting Crows, the one that signaled the beginning of their "middle age" and of an artistic output that was looser and more easygoing than before. Since then, year after year, the Crows have flattened out, taking on the shape of a skilled roots-rock revival band, stripped of the energy of the Nineties-era Duritz and of a poetic spark that has largely gone dormant, though often masked behind the skill and experience of its members.

"Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!" does nothing to buck this trend either: poised between The Band and the more electric side of Bob Dylan, it sounds like an almanac of seminal, roots American rock, but without anything particularly important to say. Then again, this is what Counting Crows are today: craftsmen of rock, of dirty guitars, of piano keys that pound and slow down, of the Hammond organ filling the air (listen, for instance, to "Virginia Through The Rain"), of backing vocals propping up a chorus meant to be sung with a thread of melancholy (as in the Beatles-esque "Under the Aurora").

The question, then, is whether in 2025 any of this is actually needed, whether it's really necessary to release a record that doesn't even sound like a derivation or a reworking, but like a nostalgic imitation of a bygone era. Indeed, beyond a few distinctive and easily recognizable elements — Adam Duritz's voice above all — Counting Crows' music now sounds like rock from half a century ago, but without that urgency, that feeling and that poetry which, at the start of their career — in the thick of the grunge wave — made their anachronism and their reliance on tradition a mode of expression that was unfashionable, and therefore unusual, and for that reason respectable, almost bohemian. On the threshold of their sixties, though, it pains us to admit it: Duritz and his band remain a great group with nothing left to say.

Contributions by Alex Poltronieri ("Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings"), Giovanni Dozzini ("Underwater Sunshine", "Somewhere Under Wonderland"), Federico Piccioni ("Butter Miracle, Suite One" and "Butter Miracle, The Complete Suite").

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