Counting Crows' Adam Duritz

By Jay Cridlin

cridlin@tampabay.com

Is Counting Crows cool?

Sounds like a trick question, considering the band's 15-year string of ridiculously catchy hits and a roster of celebrity paramours on the part of singer Adam Duritz that would make Jack Nicholson blush. But hey, the evidence is there.

Exhibit A: The band received an Oscar nod for the song Accidentally in Love from the movie Shrek 2. Flatulent green cartoon monsters who do karaoke to Billy Joel = painfully uncool.

Exhibit B: The band was name-checked in the season premiere of The Office, where Dunder-Mifflin duncemaster general Michael Scott and goofy new H.R. director Holly played will-they-or-won't-they over a pair of — you guessed it — Counting Crows tickets.

Duritz heard about the reference and thought it was sweet — but not as sweet as the time he popped up on Family Guy.

"I looked up, and there I was, on Family Guy, out of nowhere," Duritz said this week by phone from Atlanta, where he and Counting Crows are on tour with Maroon 5 and Augustana. "I was honored. It's a great show. It's pretty much too late (to appear on) Beavis and Butthead; that just leaves South Park."

On the phone, Duritz seems like a pretty cool guy (especially when he gets to talking about his beloved University of California Golden Bears). A few days before Counting Crows' show at the Ford Amphitheatre on Friday, Duritz chatted with tbt* about the art of live performance and how hard it is to write an uncool song. Here are excerpts.

What was your reaction when you heard that Counting Crows played sort of a major plot point in The Office?

My first reaction was, did they talk s--- about us? (laughs) But then I was like, oh, cool. Great. You know what was weird? We were playing in Scranton earlier in the summer, and one of the guys from The Office came down and sort of hosted the show. It was the character Kevin. He introduced the band, talked about stuff in between the acts. I wasn't sure why. But now … (laughs)

You're touring with Maroon 5 now. Aside from the fact that you and Adam Levine are both named Adam, what kind of parallels do you see between you and them?

Well, we're bands that play music.

(laughs) Well, yeah.

I mean, that sounds like a simple thing, but nowadays, especially, there's a lot of people out there that don't play their music. People play the instruments on this tour. Maroon 5 may be more of a pop band in some ways than we are, but they play rock and roll music. They get up onstage, and they do it. That's not fake. Those guys are real musicians.

Is the performing experience different now than it was 10, 12 years ago?

No. You go up and you play with your heart. It's a simple thing. The Counting Crows thing is not about playing songs like they are on the record. I think you should feel like you're right in the middle of it happening right then, like a song is being written right in front of you. From the very beginning, our own fans were like, "Jesus, why can't you just play the damn song the way it is on the record?" It drives a lot of people crazy. They either think we're giving you a very special and unique performance, or we're ruining our songs. It depends on if you want to sing along or not — but I figure I'm a better singer than you are, so why don't you let me do the singing, and you listen and enjoy yourselves (laughs).

Do you feel like you have to reinvent a song like Mr. Jones every single time you go out on tour?

I feel like I have to reinvent a song like Mr. Jones every single time I sing it. It should feel like it's happening right then and there, the moment you do it. Like, we've come up with this version of Rain King on tour; it's really, really, really cool. But even that is still being changed every single night. The other night, I started humming part of a Beatles song in the middle of it, because I was thinking, "The only way we're surviving this is with a little help with our friends." So I just started singing, "I get by with a little help from my friends," a little bit, and then went back into the song during the breakdown. Night after that, I actually pulled the piano out onstage, and we actually played half of With a Little Help From My Friends in the middle of Rain King.

Is there a song in the Counting Crows catalog that you think never got its due as a song?

The song that I think never really got its due in a lot of ways is Accidentally In Love (from Shrek 2). It's so much harder to write a really heartfelt love song without seeming like a cliché, to find original ways to say enthusiastic things about love, than it is to be dark and to write a song that's much more depressing. You know, "Baby I surrender to the strawberry ice cream never-ever-ender" — that might be the best line I've ever written in my life. What a great description of love. ... But I think it wasn't cool for people. A song from like a cartoon movie that's a very unabashedly heartfelt love song, that's not dark or deep ... there's a too-cool-for-school thing out there, you know? I have godchildren and nephews, and I wanted to do a movie that they could attach to, so they could see their Uncle Adam's music in something like that. I did it for the best reasons, I think the movie's really good, and I'm proud to be in it. Mostly, I just think it's a great song. I'm really, really happy I wrote it.