The Counting Crows first studio album in six years, 'Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings,' almost didn't happen. "I just didn't want to do it anymore," frontman Adam Duritz tells Spinner. 'I thought about letting everything go -- maybe not forever, but for a long time."But once Duritz started writing a record about disintegration, he reached a turning point and things got better. For Duritz, 'Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings' thumbs its nose at the record company execs who think they know what's best for his band. The album launches with the bang of '1492,' which Duritz calls "a pretty bleak picture of things."
"This album is about a long trip through a pretty dark part of my life, and that song was the start of it all," he says. "It's the perfect leading song, but amazingly, the one that everyone at the record company wanted off the record. I think it defies stylistically who they'd like the Counting Crows to be. They wanted to homogenize the record and make it a more digestible, palatable morsel. But I wasn't about to change it for them."
"Look, I'm the one who is still here after eighteen years and you've been at your job five minutes," Duritz continues. "You can count on one hand the bands that came out the same time as us that are still around. I'm only going to make records the way I want to make them. And I think the scope and separation are what makes [the new album] so vital."
The Counting Crows kick off a co-headling North American tour with Maroon 5 on July 25 in Virginia Beach.
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1. Duritz is right. The '90's was the musical equivelent of uncontrollable flatulence. About 3 or 4 bands actually made an impact, the rest were already on their way out before their cds were even released. A collossal decade of garbage.
The Counting Crows were one of the few worthwhile projects to come out of the steaming dung pile. Darkly twisted lyrics with just a glimmer of hope thrown in-bleak, but agressively honest.
While I personally can't relate to songs about drug addiction, I can feel the emotional strain and depression of Duritz through the music. And while drug abuse is self destructive behaviour, once the cycle has begun the misery of it becomes apparent to all but the afflicted. The music conveys this with out being oppressively self-pitying or trying to justify bad behaviour.
To me, anyway, playing the Crows makes me feel like my life isn't so bad after all.
Scott at 10:03AM on May 2nd 2008