Counting Crows

Counting Crows is one of those bands you follow for the long haul. For those that first heard them opening for Bob Dylan long ago, or subbing for Van Morrison one memorable night at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, much of the soundtrack of our times comes from the Crows — from their vivid musical landscapes as well as the feverish brilliance of singer/songwriter Adam Duritz.

To listeners like these, hearing Hard Candy is like reaching the next level in a love affair: It’s familiar yet filled with passion and surprise. Scheduled for release on July 9, it’s a tumble of images, musical and lyrical, that somehow fall into patterns of insight and inspiration. It’s an adventure as well, a stream of stories and portraits, some of them unsparing in their candor, all of them connected to the dreams and disappointments we have all experienced, together and alone.

But there’s wisdom here for new fans too, for those who would catch a ride and join the Crows even at this stage of their trip. You don’t need to wear the badge of any generation; the anthems and intimacies of Hard Candy transcend categories, age groups — maybe, like all classics, time itself.

The wait for Hard Candy began in 1999, after release of This Desert Life. For a while the band was talking about releasing a collection of covers. But that talk subsided as Duritz began to sense the first stirrings of a new album. Like everything in the Crows catalog, this one had its own personality almost from the beginning.

“I wanted to make a totally different kind of record this time,” he says. “I had this conversation about music with Paul McCartney at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a couple of years ago, and I came away thinking that I want to concentrate on melody. For the new album I really wanted songs that you can’t get out of your head, not just mood pieces. People began taking melody for granted when they started thinking of songwriters as poets. Well, poetry is great, and I read poetry, but I haven’t the slightest interest in being a poet. I’m a songwriter, and I want to engrave my songs in people’s heads.”

This led to a slight change in his working method for the Hard Candy songs. As always, the inspiration comes from a feeling — something vague, perhaps, but real, waiting to be sculpted into sound. But this time, hot on its heels, came the melodies. Most often these came to Duritz in a rush, in need only of a tweak or two. If not, he trashed the song and moved on to the next.

Something else distinguished Hard Candy as well: an obsession with detail that mirrored Duritz’s new standards for tunefulness. In the past the idea was to find that element that would unlock each song in live performance. While not setting this aside, Duritz and his colleagues worked harder than ever to find the perfect string part, or create an unbeatable groove. To keep things fresh, they also changed their studio routine: Rather than plunge into marathon stretches of recording, the band would alternate periods in the studio with short stretches of touring. With these missions running in tandem, Hard Candy was intended to surpass the band’s highest expectations at both the micro and macro levels.

This search for perfection led them, for the first time, to use more than one producer. Their work with Ethan John (Ryan Adams, Rufus Wainwright, Whiskeytown) clicked immediately. They spent a week or so with him, left to go on the road for a while, then came back for a second productive round. Though these sessions went well, the band rethought some of the songs during another tour; when they returned, they hooked up with another producer, Steve Lillywhite (U2, The Pogues, The La’s, Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, XTC), and finished up the album by redoing some of the earlier sessions and acing the rest of their unrecorded material.

“I had worked with Ethan on some Ryan Adams records, so I knew he was really great,” Duritz says. “He’s very much into capturing the performance, which really suited us well. ‘ It was really interesting to work with each guy for a two-to-four-week period, then go on the road and not be back in the studio for three or four months. You had to be so into it when you were in the studio, because you were always thinking about the fact that you were running out of time.

“The willingness of the producers to work with us on our schedule was really important too,” he adds. “It wasn’t the easiest thing for any of them; it called for differences in the way they’d normally schedule themselves. And when Steve was made president of Mercury Records in England, he actually put that off for a month to finish with us. That’s really above and beyond.”

The musical results of the Hard Candy session are easy to hear; performances are crisp, tight, sometimes playful, occasionally heroic. But as always with the Crows, a current of compelling lyrics runs beneath this surface, conveying messages with an eloquence that’s rare in music today.

All kinds of arresting pictures and wordplay populate these songs. There are places, faraway and close at hand: an empty Los Angeles viewed through a filter of sleepless despair, a glittering yet foreboding Miami skyline, an idyllic mirage of Spain, a gauzy watercolor of a Long Island afternoon. “This place-name thing is actually a joke within the band,” Duritz admits. “They kept a piece of paper on the wall, which became known as the ‘world-domination page.’ Every time another place came up in a song, they’d write it up there as part of ‘Adam’s attempt to conquer the world through songwriting.’”

But these pictures reflect something more profound in the Hard Candy lyrics: Duritz’s gift for taking the listener into the heart of a story through attention to its details. “Detail is everything in writing,” he insists. “It’s more important to describe a room than to tell you how someone feels in a room. What are you really getting out of someone telling you they feel lonely? Big deal. What does “hung-over” mean? Nothing. But,” quoting now from “Holiday in Spain,” “‘someone stole my shoes, there’s a couple of bananas and a bottle of booze’? You get the picture.”

These details bring us once again into Duritz’s turf — his complex inner life, whose undisguised shortcomings and poetic epiphanies reflect what goes on behind the doors closed on all our souls. For all the variety in their themes, the Hard Candy songs hang together on a single thread, which Duritz identifies as memory.

“This album is about memory. What you have when you can’t seem to so the things you need to do to feel okay. When you join a band because you can’t seem to stay home or when you step off the edge of the world, as the guy does in ‘New Frontier,’ because you choose not to go home, what you have left is memory. Staring at photographs and remembering a time when things were better is one way you make yourself feel okay. Calling your girl in the middle of the night — that’s another way. And remembering the people who have passed-that’s another way too – so they don’t ever simply disappear. It’s all the ways you use your memory to get yourself all right, to get you high — to be okay.”

Look for Counting Crows to tour extensively in the months to come, including as opening act to Santana in Europe and the Who along the West Coast.

1989
Singer Adam Duritz and guitarist David Bryson are introduced by San Francisco Bay Area musician David Immergluck and subsequently begin writing songs together.

1990
Duritz and Bryson perform as an acoustic duo at coffeehouses and small clubs. They call themselves Counting Crows after an English divination rhyme.

August 1991
Duritz and Bryson recruit Bay Area music scene friends Matt Malley (bass), Charles Gillingham (keyboards) and Steve Bowman (drums) to record a demo. Their chemistry undeniable, they start performing at San Francisco clubs.

February 1992
Counting Crows perform at a BMI New Music Showcase at San Francisco’s I-Beam club.

April 1992
Counting Crows sign with DGC Records.

June 1992
Counting Crows open for Bob Dylan in Los Angeles.

Fall 1992/Winter 1993
Counting Crows record their debut album, August and Everything After, at a rented mansion in the Hollywood Hills. They live on the premises during the sessions.

January 1993
Counting Crows fill in for Van Morrison at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

August 1993
Guitarist Dan Vickrey joins Counting Crows.

Sept. 14, 1993
August and Everything After, produced by T-Bone Burnett (Elvis Costello, Los Lobos, Roy Orbison), is released.

November 1993
Rolling Stone calls August and Everything After “one of the best rock releases of the year” and gives it a four-star review.

Fall/Winter 1993
Counting Crows tour, opening for Midnight Oil, Suede and The Cranberries.

January – June 1994
Counting Crows tour, opening for Cracker.

January 1994
August and Everything After enters the Billboard Top 200 album chart.

January 1994
Counting Crows appear on “Saturday Night Live.”

April 1994
August and Everything After peaks on the Billboard 200 at No. 4. Its chart run will last 93 weeks.

Summer 1994
Counting Crows headline tour of theaters. Duritz invites his personal favorites to open the shows, including Alex Chilton, Buffalo Tom, Chainsaw Kittens, Velocity Girl, The Cox Family, Dog’s Eye View and The Gigolo Aunts.

August 1994
Counting Crows join The Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge Tour as special guests.

September 8, 1994
Counting Crows win MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist in a Video, for “Mr. Jones.”

September 13, 1994
“Going Back to Georgia,” a duet featuring and co-written by Duritz and Nanci Griffith, appears on Griffith’s album Flyer.

October 12, 1994
Drummer Ben Mize replaces Bowman.

Winter 1994
Counting Crows tour Europe.

January 1995
Counting Crows win American Music Award for Favorite Artist, Alternative Music.

May 1995
Counting Crows begin writing material for Recovering the Satellites.

July 18, 1995
Counting Crows’ cover of The Psychedelic Furs song “The Ghost In You” appears on the soundtrack to the film “Clueless.”

Winter 1995/1996
Recovering the Satellites is recorded in another big Hollywood house on a hill, with the band again choosing to reside on the premises.

Oct. 8, 1996
Recovering the Satellites, produced by Gil Norton (The Pixies, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Mieces, Del Amitri), is released on vinyl as a double album.

Oct. 15, 1996
Recovering the Satellites is released on cd and cassette.

Oct. 20, 1996
Recovering the Satellites debuts on the Billboard 200 at #1.

Oct. 23, 1996
August and Everything After is certified seven-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Nov. 12, 1996
U.S. theater tour begins in New Haven, Conn. The band again invites some of their favorite acts to open, including Cake and Fiona Apple.

Dec. 2, 1996
Duritz seriously injures his knee during opening night of a four-night stand at New York’s Beacon Theatre. Despite intense pain, he continues the show, and no subsequent performances are cancelled due to the injury. Duritz undergoes open-knee surgery over the Christmas holidays.

Dec. 11 and 12, 1996
Counting Crows become first band to appear on the “Late Show With David Letterman” for two consecutive nights, a first for the program.

May 3 – June 13, 1997
European Theater tour (beginning in Galway, Ireland).

June 5, 1997
Recovering the Satellites is certified double platinum.

June 21, 1997
Band performs for a half million people at the Blockbuster Rockfest in Dallas, Texas.

July 1 – Nov. 6, 1997
Band headlines on a summer shed tour. Supporting acts include The Wallflowers, That Dog, The Gigolo Aunts and Bettie Serveert.

Aug. 12, 1997
Band performs at New York’s Chelsea Studios for taping of VH-1’s “Storytellers” series.

Nov. 6, 1997
Counting Crows performs at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom for taping of MTV’s “Live at the Ten Spot” series. Show marks the end of the band’s U.S. tour.

Nov. 26 – Dec. 20, 1997
Second European theater tour.

Dec. 8 and 9, 1997
Counting Crows perform two sold-out shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

July 14, 1998
Across a Wire – Live in New York is released.

August 1998
Band begins writing and recording their third studio album with David Lowery (Sparklehorse, Lauren Hoffman, September 67) and Dennis Herring (Cracker, Camper Van Beethoven, Throwing Muses) co-producing ‘ in yet another house on a hill in Hollywood.

November 1999
The album This Desert Life, is released Nov. 2, 1999.