Adam Duritz On New Counting Crows Album Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!

What began in 2021 upon the release of the EP Butter Miracle, Suite One, is completed today as Counting Crows release the brand new album Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!, their first full length studio effort since 2014.

Now available on CD or vinyl and for online streaming via BMG, the new album includes the original four song EP plus five new tracks which showcase the incomparable storytelling of songwriter and vocalist Adam Duritz, amongst the best of his generation, set against raucous guitar work drawing on everything from Mick Ronson (David Bowie) to punk rock.

Writing from a farm in England, several of the tracks have roots dating back to the quarantine of pandemic, with Duritz affected by the times as Counting Crows again enlist producer Brian Deck (Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, Somewhere Under Wonderland, Butter Miracle, Suite One), while working alongside engineer Joey Wunsch from New York City’s Flux Studios on the new five tracks.

Prepping a summer tour set to kick off June 10, 2025 in Nashville, ahead of European dates taking the band into November, Counting Crows will appear beside heart-on-sleeve indie rockers The Gaslight Anthem during most of the U.S. run.

“I really like to tour with friends. I love to tour with bands I like. Because I’m gonna watch them all of the time – so I don’t really want to spend my summers with a bunch of a–holes. And the nice thing is Brian’s great,” said Duritz with a smile during a recent video call, shouting out Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon. “I’m really excited. I’ve always liked the band. It first came to my attention because of ‘High Lonesome’ – because it quotes our songs,” said Duritz of a Gaslight Anthem track which nods lyrically in the direction of “Round Here,” from Counting Crows’ massive 1993 debut August and Everything After. “They’ve just been a great band for a lot of years now.”

I spoke with Adam Duritz about the influence of “Round Here” on “With Love, From A-Z,” the new album’s opening track, constructing Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!, the importance of storytelling, navigating a changing music industry and much more. A transcript of our video call, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows below.

Jim Ryan: Following work on the suite, when and where did you start working on this new batch of five songs?

Adam Duritz: Right away, the next year. I went back to the farm and wrote these songs. And on the way home, I stopped in London. I have some friends in this band Gang of Youths – an Australian band but they live in London. And I had sung on their new record but they kind of scrapped it and were re-recording a more ambitious version of it. And they wanted me to come sing again. So, I did. And then, after I got home, David Le’aupepe, the lead singer, sent me the record. And it was so good! And I realized that my songs weren’t at that level – not the suite but these new ones that I had written. They just weren’t good enough. And so I went back to the drawing board.

I put all of this work in. And then I found that I had kind of lost confidence in it. The songs sat for two years. Because, having re-written them, I thought that they were then done. But I found that I just wasn’t sure if they were any good anymore, you know? I didn’t even send them to the band. I sort of sat on them for two years. And then what happened is I wrote “With Love, From A-Z.” And I thought that was great. And that made me go back and examine the other songs again.

I called our guitar player David Immerglück, Millard and Jim, our bass player and drummer, and said, “I need you all to come here to my house. I need to play these songs with you. Just in the living room, we can do them right here with a small drum kit. But I’ve got to play these songs. I can’t tell if they’re right. Because I can’t play them the way that they’re supposed to sound. I need a band.”

So, they came to New York a few weeks later. And we started demoing the songs in my living room. And they were great! I was so excited. One by one they just came out fantastic. Over about four or five days we did all the songs – like one a day. And at the end, I was like, “Sh–t, what have I been doing for two years?! These are f–ing great!” I was really frustrated about that. But we were all so excited that I said, “Listen, we’ve just got to go into the studio right away.” So, we were in like two or three weeks later. We went into the studio and took 11 days maybe? Recorded the other half of the record. Done.

Ryan: I love the way “With Love, From A-Z” opens the record. That bluesy, rocking opening guitar part reminded me of Buddy Guy. Plus there’s the storytelling element. How did that one kind of come together?

Duritz: I think I wanted everything on this record, other than “Virginia Through the Rain,” to have big guitars – almost punky. Somewhere between Mick Ronson and punk guitar. We just wanted to have loud guitars.

In a lot of ways, “With Love, From A-Z” is a folk song. But I wanted to kind of play against the character of it. It is structured like a folk song. But I didn’t want it to be an acoustic guitar song. And Immer just came up with that guitar part. That distorted thing. It wasn’t anything I was thinking. But I really liked it. It was how we got the song started. When we were doing the song in my living room, he just started strumming it like that. Rather than count ourselves in, he just started and the band came in. And I just really liked it.

It gave a caustic kind of edge to the song – so it didn’t just do the folk song thing. It had some in your face punch to it. Because I think that’s really necessary. We wanted it to have that.

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Ryan: On the suite, “Bobby and the Rat-Kings” felt to me like it kind of had that punch. That love of rock and roll is apparent. On the new five, “Boxcars” certainly seems to maintain that spirit. What were you going for there?

Duritz: “Boxcars” is a funny song. Because, in a lot of ways, it’s the oldest song – but not really.

The real genesis of that song was during the pandemic. All of the sudden there’s two years with no gigs. And, also, New York was a pretty scary place to be during that. The whole city was shut down. And a lot of people died – I mean a lot of people died. There were freezer trucks in front of all of the hospitals to store the bodies.

I’m walking around the house one day and I start playing air guitar and singing. And it becomes this riff that for two years I drove my girlfriend crazy with. I can’t play music – but I’ve got this metal riff in my head! (Hums riff to “Boxcars”) But what am I going to do with it? I realized after awhile that it’s such a good riff! It’s such a great guitar riff. I kind of tossed it away after awhile.

When I got to the beginning to write what became “Boxcars,” I just had the music for the verse and the chorus – the first half of the chorus. And I came out of the chorus at one point and I was like, “Makes it easier on me…” (hums riff) One time when he was over here having dinner, I said to Immer, “Could you play this riff with this music?” And he played it on one of my acoustics. And it was so good! I was like, “Maybe this is the f–ing signature riff for this new song I’m writing…”

So, it’s funny. In a way it was started before any of the other songs – because it was started in the middle of the pandemic with that riff. And it was finished after all of the other songs. It was such a guitar song that I couldn’t play it on piano. And so I could never really finish it because I couldn’t play it to sing along to it.

So, it had this weird, long journey that most songs don’t usually have.

Ryan: There were a few lyrics in “Under the Aurora” that jumped out at me. One was “A man on tele tries to tell me what is real…” Were the times sort of seeping into the songwriting process there?

Duritz: Yeah. I was kind of writing this whimsical life during the apocalypse [thing].

I was on that farm in England. And I had been in England for a while. So, I was writing it from the perspective of someone in England, The Times and the Telegraph being the papers over there – and the BBC. That was kind of my mindset at the time. And it was just kind of this whimsical song about the beginnings of the apocalypse hitting in London and trying to make a hit while that’s happening. It had a different chorus that was not as good. It was catchy – but it didn’t mean much.

That was also very affected by the time during the pandemic and everything too. Because there was a lot going on in the world. A lot of people were dying. George Floyd was killed. And there were a lot of protests. And a lot of people who were really angry and really hurt and really frustrated about their place in life in America. So, when I was writing that chorus, it was watching that all from a distance in your house while you’re shut down in there. And around you are all of these funerals and all of these protests. And you’re wondering what place a whimsical song like that has in that world, you know? So, I was very affected by it.

And it’s also a bit of an homage to Gang of Youths too. Because the song that really knocked me off being done with these songs was their song called “The Man Himself,” which is David Le’aupepe’s song about his father dying – and realizing that his father had this whole life before their family that nobody knew about. But one of the things he says is, “And they’re hummin’ away, hummin’ away…” He repeats that line in that song. And so I put that line into “Under the Aurora” too.

Ryan: One of my favorite elements of your songwriting over all of these years now is the storytelling component. It’s an element of your podcasting and it’s certainly there in Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets! How important is the idea of storytelling to you?

Duritz: Well, I mean, all songs are stories, you know? I think I’ve gotten away from nonfiction a little bit more in the last 10 years or so. It’s still expressing all of the things I feel – but I’ve been willing to express them in things that were not stories about my life: they’re just stories about how I feel about life.

Like “Palisades Park,” the characters in that are not me. And on a lot of this album they’re not. They really are on “With Love, From A-Z.” I kind of think that’s, in its own way, an update of “Round Here.” It’s very much a statement of where I am in the world right now, where I am in my life. But a lot of the other stuff on this album is fictional stories. I found that it was possible to express just as honestly things I was feeling with plotlines from other characters.

But all songs are kind of storytelling. I don’t know if I think about it as storytelling. I just think about them as songs. I want them to have a certain quality and I want them to have details and I want them to be rich. I want the imagery to be rich enough for you to immerse yourself in it. But, really, to me, I’m a songwriter. I’m not a poet. I’m not a fiction writer. I really write songs. And I just think of them as that.

Ryan: So, Counting Crows broke through in the early 90s at the height of that major label system. Within a few years that starts to change – and here we are a few decades later. But looking at the way the industry works today, does it force you to keep a little closer eye on the business side in a way I’m guessing you probably didn’t have to 30 years ago? How have you adapted to that?

Duritz: No, you needed to keep an eye on it when you had a label. You really needed to keep an eye on it when there was a record label! I mean, that was the downfall of a lot of musicians in history. That’s not where you want to place your trust all of the time.

I just think it’s different. There’s a lot of positives and negatives. On the downside, it’s that no one pays for music anymore. And that sort of sucks. The percentage we get from Spotify is miniscule. I mean, it was great for the record companies. Because it was a big payday at a time when they were cash poor and all going out of business. They get a lot of money from Spotify. How that trickles down to us is fractions of fractions of cents, you know?

But, on the other hand, you used to have to have a major label deal to make music. Because you couldn’t afford to go into a recording studio and you couldn’t afford to print up records and distribute them in trucks across America or the world. Nowadays, you can make your music in your bedroom on your computer and you don’t have to distribute anything or print up anything – you can just upload it to Bandcamp. There’s a lot of ways in which the gatekeepers have been removed. Everybody can do it on their own now in a way that’s wonderful. It’s a great thing for music. And yet it’s not always a great thing for musicians. But that’s always been true. The record company system wasn’t great for musicians either.

But, I mean, there are very few businesses that could survive having lost basically half of their income. And the record industry has lost half of its income – because we don’t get paid for records anymore. We basically just have touring – and it’s hard to support yourself just that way. Especially when it costs so much money to go overseas. You’ve got less crowds over there because people don’t know you as well.

You used to be able to balance that out because you were making money from records – but now it’s just like a bottom line: do you spend more or make more on tour?