Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings will be the last Counting Crows record. Not because they’re breaking up, but because who makes records in this ghostly digital world anymore? Apparently the Counting Crows do, and their singer, primary songwriter, lyricist, and spiritual center, Adam Duritz demands, “If the music business is falling apart and no one is buying records anymore, and if this the last record anybody makes, we’re going out with a bang!”
Fifteen years ago, in the band’s debut single, “Mr. Jones,” Duritz pleaded from the edge of oblivion: “I want to be someone who believes.” And now, after nearly two decades of walking what he describes as a tightrope of fame and fortune while teetering on the edge of a serious mental disorder, the same voice laments in a new song, “Sundays”: “I don’t believe in anything at all.”
For the better part of the past two years, Duritz was debilitated from a psychosis called Dissociative Disorder, causing him to retreat into isolation and gain an alarming amount of weight. He stopped reading, a purgatory for a Lit Major from Cal Berkley, and worst of all, stopped writing songs and performing, what he describes as his “touchstone” to the world.
It was a culmination of what Duritz says was “one long downhill slide” from which he has emerged after entering a program and receiving the correct medication. He is eating healthier, dropped the weight, and wrote and recorded the gripping Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, which he describes as songs about “dissolution and disintegration and climbing out of the hole.”
“Every chorus of ‘Mr. Jones’ ends with ‘When everybody loves me I’ll never be lonely,” which you know is not true,” Duritz argues today. “Winning a popularity contest cannot fix your life. You’re supposed to see through that in the song. The guy has a dream, and it’s a great dream; you should have it—go ahead and want to be a rock and roll star—but that dream is not going to fix your life. I knew that even then. Before it happened to me.”
It has been a long, strange trip from evangelical to agnostic; most of it details bleed from every track on what may be the final collective yawp from his band, the Counting Crows; the canvas for his journey from endless night to a new morning. One Duritz is not afraid to share in song or on the cover of another rock and roll weekly.
There appears to be a concerted effort to push the Saturday Nights part of the record in your face, electric guitars, edgier lyrics, and then unfurl the second half as a mellower, reflective collection of songs.
There was no concept to it. The songs define it, and then you make it work; but once it’s there, there is no compromising. There were people who told me to take several songs off this record, ‘1492,’ for instance. ‘It says ugly things about yourself like “you can’t count on me.” It’s embarrassing, so get it off! Pick a more positive song!’ So, it says really ugly things about me? ‘On A Tuesday In Amsterdam Long Ago’ is embarrassingly raw too. I admit it. It’s ugly to them, but to me, it’s kind of the point of it all, like it or not. Maybe they’re all embarrassing. Maybe ‘Tuesday’ is over-raw. Who knows? But it can’t be over-raw if it’s exactly how I felt. If it’s over-raw then that’s who I am, so either way is true. If you’re an artist, you owe the truth. Period. That’s all you really owe. People can make judgments whether they like it or not. For me, it’s exactly how I felt. Maybe my style’s over-raw.
Could there be a song that you’ve written that would never be released because it’s too close to the bone?
No, I don’t think so. Too close to the bone would be the reason for releasing it. That would be the point. You want to get as close to the bone as you can.
What about the second part of the record, Sunday Mornings
As my life changed, we were finishing up what you would now call Saturday Nights. I started writing other songs, and I could see this other kind of record as a companion piece. So we started expanding on that while we were recording the second set of sessions and at the same time learning how to record and arrange what became Sunday Mornings. It was this one album that gave birth to something else it is now.
We had this great idea, it was cool, and it told a different kind of story than it would if it were a shuffle selection of easy listening songs. We were looking to do something different. Definitely by the time we were recording Sunday Mornings we were aiming at what we eventually ended up with.
