Counting Crows

There are bands of anthems and there are bands of stories. Counting Crows are one of the second kind.

Their songs are not slogans to be shouted in a stadium: they are tales, little films full of characters, of streets, of names, of nights in bars and sad mornings.

And they are sung by one of the most particular voices of the nineties: that of Adam Duritz, wounded, warm, tremulous, an heir to Van Morrison.

Stories made into songs

Counting Crows formed in 1991, in the San Francisco Bay Area —Berkeley is usually cited— when Adam Duritz and the guitarist David Bryson began playing as an acoustic duo at open mics.

In 1993 their debut album, "August and Everything After", produced by T-Bone Burnett, was a phenomenon: seven million copies sold in the United States, some ten million worldwide, and the band turned into stars almost overnight.

The key was in the songs. "Mr. Jones", their great hit, with that luminous, immediate melody. "Round Here", a melancholy, cinematic portrait of people adrift in a small town. And years later "A Long December", one of the most beautiful and saddest songs about that end-of-year feeling when you look back at what has happened and hope the next one will be better.

The music of Counting Crows —a warm mixture of folk, rock and soul, in the tradition of The Band and R.E.M.— is the kind that ages well, because it never depended on a fashion but on something harder: telling a story well and making it felt.

The dream that turned out to be a lie

And here is the nuance that explains everything, and that makes "Mr. Jones" a far deeper song than it seems.

The song was born of a real night. Duritz went out with his friend Marty Jones, the bass player in an earlier band, to see Marty's father play, a flamenco guitarist, and afterwards they ended up in a bar on Columbus, in San Francisco, dreaming of being rock stars, convinced that once they were famous and everybody loved them, they would never feel lonely again.

It is a cheerful, catchy song about wanting fame.

And the brutal irony is that Duritz got exactly that —total fame, all at once— and discovered it was a lie: that being loved by millions of strangers does not cure loneliness or mend what is broken inside.

Over the years he came to resent it. He would change lines live to contradict the wish the song expressed, and he stopped playing it every night. It is not that he disowned it —he has said he loves it— but that he learned the hard way that the dream it described was false.

Not many people live to see their own greatest success refuted.

And it is worth clearing up something that often gets told wrong: the song is not about Marty. Duritz has said it in as many words: he wrote a song about himself, and it just so happened that Marty was with him that night.

The condition that explains him

Because Adam Duritz carried, and carries, something real and difficult: a depersonalisation and derealisation disorder, a form of dissociative disorder.

It is a feeling that the world, and sometimes you yourself, are not entirely real, as if you were living behind a pane of glass. He opened up about it in an interview published by a magazine in 2008, and has repeated it since: it is not an episode, it is an everyday thing, and it isn't going anywhere.

And that is, perhaps, the secret heart of the music of Counting Crows: that estranged gaze on reality, that melancholy of someone who watches life from one step further back, that need to name and detail the world —the streets, the rain, the people— almost as a way of holding on to it.

Fame, for someone like that, instead of a prize was one more layer of unreality.

Duritz did something brave: instead of hiding it, he spoke about his mental health for years, when almost nobody did, and in doing so he helped others to name their own.

Two notes from that time

There are a couple of things from those years worth clarifying.

The first is musical, and surprises everyone: Counting Crows have an extremely catchy soundtrack song, "Accidentally in Love", the bright, bouncing track that opens "Shrek 2", in 2004. It was nominated for the Oscar for best original song, they played it at the ceremony, and it lost —it is worth saying— to "Al otro lado del río", by Jorge Drexler, the first song in Spanish to win that award.

The second is sadder, and it is the crossover with "Friends": at the height of his success, Duritz first dated Jennifer Aniston, briefly, in 1995, and afterwards, for longer, Courteney Cox, whom he met when she appeared in the video for "A Long December". They were consecutive relationships, not simultaneous ones.

What is interesting, and very much like him, is the way he tells it today: he connects those intense, fragile relationships with his untreated illness and with how disorienting sudden fame was, that sense of attaching yourself quickly and strongly to people while inside you are falling apart.

Even his most talked-about romances end up speaking, deep down, about the same thing as his songs: loneliness, and how strange it felt to be alive.

What to remember

Counting Crows are the proof that a song can be a story, and that melancholy well told is one of the most consoling things there is: hearing someone put into words that diffuse sadness you didn't know how to name.

If you play "Mr. Jones", "A Long December", "Round Here" or "Colorblind", you will hear a great nineties rock band, yes, but above all an extraordinary storyteller singing about loneliness, desire, and how strange it is sometimes to be alive.

Behind those songs there is a man who dreamed of fame, got it, discovered it did not save him, and had the courage to say so.

That honesty —not pretending that success mends what you carry inside— is rare, and it is precious.

That is why his songs, thirty years on, still sound so true.

This text mentions mental health. If you or someone you know needs it, in Chile you can call Salud Responde, 600 360 7777, which gives guidance 24 hours a day, and in the case of a mental health crisis or suicidal ideation there is the Ministry of Health's *4141 line, free and available 24 hours a day from mobile phones.

Sources

Counting Crows, American rock band formed in 1991 in the San Francisco Bay Area —Berkeley is usually cited as its origin— by the singer Adam Fredric Duritz (Baltimore, Maryland, 1 August 1964) and the guitarist David Bryson, who began as an acoustic duo on the open mic circuit. Their debut album, "August and Everything After" (14 September 1993, produced by T-Bone Burnett), reached number 4 on the Billboard 200 and was certified 7× platinum by the RIAA in October 1996, with worldwide sales estimated at some 10 million; it included "Mr. Jones" and "Round Here". The claim that it was "the fastest-selling album since Nevermind" is a promotional formula of the time that the figures do not support. Among their later hits is "A Long December" (from "Recovering the Satellites", 1996). Their style mixes folk, rock and soul, with influences from Van Morrison, The Band and R.E.M. "Mr. Jones" came out of a night in San Francisco with Marty Jones, bass player in Duritz's previous band, The Himalayans, after seeing Marty's father, the flamenco guitarist David Serva, play; Duritz has specified that he wrote a song about himself and that Marty simply happened to be there that night. Over the years he stopped playing it every night and came to alter lines live, uncomfortable with the song's irony, although he has said he loves it. Duritz suffers from a depersonalisation and derealisation disorder, a form of dissociative disorder, which he opened up about in an interview published by Men's Health in April 2008 —a text that appeared in the first person but that he did not write— and about which he has spoken repeatedly since; his frankness helped to make mental health visible. In 2004, Counting Crows wrote and performed "Accidentally in Love" for the opening scene of "Shrek 2"; it was nominated for the Oscar for best original song at the 77th ceremony (2005), where the band performed it, and the award went to "Al otro lado del río", by Jorge Drexler. At the height of his fame, Duritz had a brief relationship with Jennifer Aniston in 1995 and, afterwards, a longer one with Courteney Cox, whom he met after her appearance in the video for "A Long December"; he has linked them in retrospect to his untreated illness and to the disorienting effects of sudden fame. The band remains active. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Readings of the meaning of their work are offered as the author's interpretation. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, RIAA, Houstonia, HuffPost, San Francisco Chronicle, Minsal and other press coverage.