Adam Duritz Is Still Looking for Meaning—And Finding It in Music

The Counting Crows frontman opens up about rewriting songs, reflecting on the past, and what music still gives him today.

By Yasmine Shemesh

Published on July 10, 2025

Everything finally made sense. He made sense. Songwriting was something Adam Duritz had always needed—he just hadn’t known it yet. That’s how the Counting Crows frontman felt the first time he wrote a song in his dorm at Berkeley.

Before that, Duritz still had music. Just listening was rewarding. It soundtracked his family’s moves from Baltimore to El Paso before settling in California. San Francisco’s scene gave him a million transformative moments as a kid going to shows, but writing offered something different.

“One of the difficulties I’ve had in my life is being disconnected from myself, from the world, from other people,” Duritz says, adding that it stems from dissociative disorders which he was diagnosed with around 2008. “I think it’s probably one of the reasons that discovering songwriting was so important to me, because I had trouble connecting with people when I was younger. It just really changed my life to have a place to put all that stuff and something that really mattered to me.”

That search for connection has shaped the contours of Duritz’s songwriting—from the Crows’ breakthrough single “Mr. Jones” (“When everybody loves me, I can never be lonely”) to “The Tall Grass” (“Can you see me?”), an affecting acoustic track from the band’s new album Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!. In many ways, Duritz’s need to write is the same as it ever was. But it’s also evolved.

“For a long time in my life it was all I had, and it was everything to me,” he says. “It was more important than anything else in life. And I don’t think that’s true anymore.” Though being in the band and making music still remains a core part of Duritz’s identity, there are now other dimensions that are just as meaningful. “The difference, now, is it’s not the sum total of my existence as it once was.”

When RANGE calls, Duritz is at home in New York. Behind him hang two paintings by Felipe Molina, the artist who created the cover art for the band’s 2014 album, Somewhere Under Wonderland. Molina painted one work for each song—Duritz has an urbanized field of green for “Palisades Park” and a road tracing the ground like a Richter scale for “Earthquake Driver.”

That album was the last before Duritz wrote the first part of Butter Miracle at a friend’s farm in England. Four songs came easily and were released in 2021 as Suite One. After those sessions, en route to New York, Duritz stopped in London to sing on Angel in Realtime, an album that his friends Gang of Youths were recording. It’s about loss and identity—and, Duritz enthuses, “the best record anyone’s done in the last decade.” So good, in fact, that after hearing it, he realized the songs he’d written weren’t good enough.

Duritz shelved them for a couple years before rewriting. “I’ve almost never rewritten anything like that,” he admits. “I get it in one sitting, generally. And, I mean, that sitting could be 40 minutes or it could be 10 hours—but I sit there until it’s done for the most part.”

Duritz invited guitarist David A. Immerglück, bassist Millard Powers, and drummer Jim Bogios to stay at his house and help finish the album, where much of it was worked out in his living room. The rollicking “Spaceman In Tulsa” became more elaborate, while “Under The Aurora,” an expansive folk-rock song, had a catchy chorus but originally lacked substance. Especially after the pandemic and the social justice movement following George Floyd’s murder, Duritz wanted the songs to mean something. He rewrote the chorus of “Aurora”:

“Where is there a place for me among the millions? / Humming and humming and humming away / If I can make it through the night and just see the aurora / I could maybe believe in something.”

The only other time Duritz rewrote a finished song was the title track for August and Everything After—the Crows’ 1993 debut that made him one of the most recognizable voices of a generation—before the band recorded the legendary outtake with the London Studio Orchestra in 2019. Though, Duritz notes modestly, he was “very inexperienced” back then.

He sometimes still writes about that young man. Not obviously—his songs aren’t diary entries—but through reflection. It’s like myth-making, he explains. “Myths last forever because they’re larger than life. And I think that songwriting, and rock and roll in a lot of ways, is about that. It’s about mythologizing your feelings and your emotions so that it has this timeless quality. It is a reflection of me, but hopefully it lasts long enough to make this impression on many people.”

Take Bobby, a character who appears throughout Butter Miracle. He symbolizes how Duritz’s life has always revolved around music—not just as a musician, but as a fan.

There was a time when Duritz and Immerglück lived together in a San Francisco warehouse. They played in multiple bands and spent months fully immersed—rehearsing, gigging, or watching friends perform nearly every night. Afterward, they’d come home around 1 a.m., listen to a track from SMiLE (they were obsessed with the lost Beach Boys album), and watch Twin Peaks until dawn.

It was weird. It was wonderful. It was total musical immersion.

Duritz still finds hope in music. “I think a big part of my life has always been the sense of possibility,” he says. “Even when I was at my worst and when things were terrible, there was a lot of hope in my songs. And I think at the core of all of them is this idea that there’s always possibility.”

We don’t always know where to put our feelings. But music, he says, helps.

“It gives people a place to feel understood and connected,” he continues. “I know it had that effect for me as a fan, growing up. At a time when we moved around a lot, I didn’t know anybody—but I had these records. My parents had records, and then I bought records, and they were a connection. They expressed all these feelings I couldn’t find a way to get out.”

And for Duritz, they still do.