This spring, Adam Duritz will be with the Counting Crows, touring the band’s latest album, Somewhere Under Wonderland.Rachel Idzerda/The Globe and Mail
After earning fame with one of the biggest albums of the early 1990s, Adam Duritz has maintained a successful and satisfying musical career, writing and recording with Counting Crows and working on independent projects. This spring, the band is touring its latest album, Somewhere Under Wonderland. Here, Duritz shares some of the secrets to his success, including why he'll never get sick of singing Mr. Jones
Don't suck – just suck it up
This is a really hard job to get and a hard job to keep. Everybody wants to do it and there's no shortage of talented people. I have so many friends who are incredibly talented musicians who will never get the opportunities that I get. It's really dumb luck, so you don't want to piss it away. It's easy to be pouty and the truth is that people put you in a lot of crappy situations, but if you go on stage or TV after that and you suck, nobody's going to care what your explanation is. It's easy to miss that – to think that you can phone it in every once in a while. There are days when you're just wiped and you were promised this and they give you that. There's no shortage of people at record companies who are lying to you. It's easy to get angry and there are a lot of totally legitimate reasons, but you cannot carry that on stage.
Pay it backward
Some of the bands we toured with early on – Suede, Midnight Oil, the Stones, Cracker – they were really good to us even though we were just the opening band and they didn't have to be. They'd hang out with us, talk to us, watch our shows and were just really supportive. After, when we were doing our own tours, we always tried to pay that back. I think listening and appreciating other bands and new bands really helps in terms of never wanting to feel jaded about music. And then also to remember how great it was as a band coming up to feel that support. It's so easy in the entertainment industry to get this feeling like you're the next thing to God. It sounds crazy, but you kind of have to make an effort not to end up there.
There's no passion in repetition
I try to think of the hit songs the way I felt when I first wrote them, which means both that I love them and also that they're no different from any other songs. When we're touring, we change up the set every night. I don't want to get sick of them, and it occurred to me early on that the surest way to get sick of something is to play it when you don't want to play it. So we don't. That way every night you're playing songs you really want to play. I really love Mr. Jones – I think it's a great song, but I don't feel like I owe any audience any one song. What you owe them is a completely passionate show.
To move ahead, get out of your head
I always want things to be true in my songs, and earlier in my career, I thought that meant I could write only about things that I had personally experienced. Most of my songs about relationships aren't about what the other person did wrong, they're about what I did wrong. It's not that other people never did things wrong, it's just that I wasn't sure I was qualified to judge that. I thought that's how you kept things authentic. Then I wrote a play and it was the first time I wrote for characters who weren't me – I wrote women's voices and just really got outside my diary. I realized that it wasn't so important to talk about my day, but about how I feel. I can do that with other people's stories. Originally I thought they weren't good, but then I realized that it wasn't that they weren't good, they were just different. If you interpret quality as being blue and you suddenly write something that's green, you might not see it as a good green, it just looks like a crappy blue.