![\"Issue36-COUNTING-CROWS\"](\"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Issue36-COUNTING-CROWS.jpg\")
COUNTING CROWS<\/h1>\nCOUNTING CROWS<\/h1>\nIn the years following 2008\u2019s Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings<\/i>, Counting Crows toured, released a couple of live records, and paid tribute to their heroes with a covers album. One thing they didn\u2019t do: make a lick of new music. Frontman Adam Duritz took a break from penning Crows material to collaborate with writer Stephen Belber on the play Black Sun<\/i>. Meantime, he slowly amassed song fragments on his phone. Last fall, when three of his bandmates joined him in NYC for writing sessions, he ran the ideas by them. \u201cThey were flipping out,\u201d says Duritz. Thus was born Somewhere Under Wonderland<\/i>, a set of brainy Americana rockers.<\/p>\n
You recorded song fragments on your phone. Would you do that again?<\/b><\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know. I never really think about how I do it. I like the finished songs. That\u2019s what worked this time. It\u2019s definitely a different way of doing it. I\u2019m just happy I finished it. I was struggling to write for myself again for a while.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
Struggle?<\/b><\/p>\n
I just wasn\u2019t doing it. But I didn\u2019t have any trouble writing for the play. If anything, it opened me up for some different kinds of writing. It was really helpful in the end. It was liberating to write for other voices\u2014to write for women, to write songs that weren\u2019t just for me. It gave me a different perspective for writing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And the band hashed it out together?<\/b><\/p>\n
It was kind of cool. The four of us got together and camped out for a week every month. We would pop in and out with ideas. People would work on stuff, and I\u2019d go to the back and come back a half-hour later with something and get their take on it. I probably wouldn\u2019t have finished any of it without the guys.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What was the first week like?<\/b><\/p>\n
I had pieces in my phone and in my notes. I had songbooks full of ideas. We started excavating them so we could see what they were. In that first week we looked at a lot of pieces of music, but didn\u2019t finish anything until I wrapped \u201cGod of Ocean Tides\u201d after they left. The next month, after the guys came back, we did five songs in one day\u2014and then it was feverish. We were finishing a song a day, which was crazy. We couldn\u2019t stop pumping stuff out. By then it was clear we had a record.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
How did you write \u201cPalisades Park\u201d?<\/b><\/p>\n
I wrote off the top of my head a year or two ago. I got the whole idea for all the musical movements in one stream-of-consciousness sitting. I was just sitting at the piano playing stuff and happened to be recording it. That song was full-blown there. It\u2019s just that there are no words. I don\u2019t know how I conceived that much musically without putting lyrics to it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And \u201cJohnny Appleseed\u2019s Lament\u201d?<\/b><\/p>\n
That was the last thing I wrote for the record. The weird thing about it was I started writing it, and I had this verse thing, and I realized it was accidentally like [Van Morrison\u2019s] \u201cCyprus Avenue.\u201d So I changed it, and then I wrote my way accidentally into some Dylan tune. And I changed it a second time. In trying to avoid these influences, I\u2019d come up with four different ways of playing the verse. We wound up using all of them in different places. It\u2019s the one song where, when I finished it, the guys didn\u2019t think it was very good. It\u2019s funny, because it\u2019s everyone\u2019s favorite now.<\/p>\n
\u2013Kenneth Partridge<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
COUNTING CROWS Frontman Adam Duritz phoned in the inspiration for their latest album In the years following 2008\u2019s Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, Counting Crows toured, released a couple of live records, and paid tribute to their heroes with a covers album. One thing they didn\u2019t do: make a lick of new music. Frontman Adam […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[3509,7652],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14626"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14628,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14626\/revisions\/14628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}