Counting Crows Touring With Young Talent Under Their Wing

By John Voket

DANBURY — Adam Duritz has a lot to be excited about. The Counting Crows singer and his band are celebrating their first independent release, Underwater Sunshine, which is receiving both critical praise and major props from fans. The band just completed an abbreviated spring tour to promote the album, and Counting Crows is about to mount a three-legged summer tour, with each segment featuring a trio of up and coming bands that Duritz and company have come to know and love – and hope to help push to the next level of fame via the tour’s exposure.

Dubbed “The Outlaw Roadshow,” Counting Crows will make the second stop of their summer-long excursion in Danbury with special guests Good Old War, Fillagar and Foreign Fields. The show hits the stage Tuesday, June 12, at Ives Concert Park, on the Westside campus of Western Connecticut State University. Gates open at 5 pm, and the music begins at 7.

During separate interviews with Duritz, who hosted a media teleconference that included The Newtown Bee, and an exclusive chat with Counting Crows guitarist Dan Vickrey, both musicians expressed excitement about touring with new material, although the new project is actually a collection of other artists’S music.

“I think an accurate distillation is a bunch of songs we like,” Duritz said during the teleconference. “I think that’s what it is; just songs we like that we felt like playing. That said, I think that it probably sounds a lot like a Counting Crows album, because when you make a record, songwriting isn’t the main thing you do.”

Duritz said that most of the work that goes into making a record is turning a skeleton of chords into a song

“Into, in our case, a Counting Crows song, and that’s something we all do together, and that takes most of the work, and that’s really no different on this album than any Counting Crows album, because that’s still what we did,” he said. “The only difference is we didn’t limit ourselves to one writer.”

22 Years Later

Coincidentally, going back to the band’s first few months together, the Crows supplemented a then limited catalog of original material with their favorite, albeit eclectic, cover songs including “Jumping Jesus” by Sordid Humor and “Mercy,” by Vickrey’s own band Tender Mercies. Now, 22 years later, both those songs show up on Underwater Sunshine, and they are still staples in the band’s set list.

“This record is kind of a continuation of something we’ve always done,” Vickrey said. “Adam always fleshed out the set with songs like these and ‘Four White Stallions.’ And that’s because Adam has always been into playing songs he loves. There are a lot of songs out there from singer-songwriters you’d never get to hear otherwise. He’s always been happy to shine a light on those artists. That was his end game, I guess.”

Vickrey said Duritz has to find an emotional attachment to a song, “but the bottom line is we play these songs because we love playing them and they fit right in. I think a lot of Counting Crows fans, if they got this record and didn’t know it was covers, would probably think it was just our own new record.”

Responding to a question from The Bee about how he decided on which bands to bring out on The Outlaw Roadshow this summer, Duritz said he has either heard or seen them live or via web videos or audio recordings.

“I’ve been pretty involved with all these bands, except for Good Old War, who someone recommended to me just a few months ago and I just loved it, so I put them on [the tour]. Except for them, I’ve been really involved with all these bands for awhile now; although, I hadn’t always met them yet,” Duritz said. “I just met Billy and the guys from We Are Odysseus at South by Southwest this year at their show.

‘A Good Start’

Duritz tells an engaging tale about meeting Foreign Fields when a mutual friend, Sean Moeller from the live concert website Daytrotter, called him.

“Sean called me and said, ‘You’ve got to check out this record,’ and I heard it and immediately … booked them for our show in South by Southwest,” Duritz said. That’s when he learned they had never played live before.

Duritz had been corresponding with the band members and went to see them play when they did a Daytrotter recording session.

“We all hung out and then they played the first song and I went to [guitarist] Brian Holl after the first song was over and I said, ‘Oh my God, that was amazing. That was gorgeous. That was an incredible song.’

“And he looked at me and he said, ‘Oh, thank God, because we’ve never played live before. This is our first real public performance and we were kind of, we weren’t sure how it was going to go.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute. What do you mean? You never played that song live?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘we never played live.’ ‘And so that song was your first live performance ever really?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Okay. Well, you’re off to a good start, a pretty good start.’ So, I’d never seen them play nor had anybody else, and they turned out to be amazing live.”

Duritz said that the plan is to switch the order of the opening acts each night so each opener has a chance to go on first, second or third before Counting Crows plays the headline set. The order for the Ives show in Danbury has not yet been announced.

Visit NewtownBee.com and click on the Features tab to find an expanded version of The Bee’s interview with Dan Vickrey and the Adam Duritz teleconference.

Tickets for the June 12 show in Danbury are on sale online at PremierBoxOffice.com, or charge by phone at 866-558-4253.