Adam Duritz: Older and wiser but still embracing his inner oddball

Adam Duritz, lead singer and songwriter of Counting Crows, discovered his life’s work one day at uni when he sat down at a piano and found himself, almost instinctively, writing a song.

“It was life-changing,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna probably do this the rest of my life’. It’s a strange thing to do – you have all these feelings and then one day it occurs to you [to write them down].”

Duritz, now a genial 60-something and shorn of the dreadlocks from the band’s early years, is quick to point out that he was not writing good songs. He was a student at Berkeley; it would be years before he was in a working rock band, years after that before he had an outfit he could call his own, and then more time as he finally began crafting songs that could get a record deal. But his course was set.

Now, almost 35 years later, Counting Crows are still going. Duritz is grateful to be back playing in Australia and happy at the reception. He says he and his bandmates still regret an ill-fated 2004 Australian outing, during which his grandmother died and he made the painful decision to go back home to be with his family.

“We really love it here,” he says earnestly. “But I had to be there for my mom, so I left the tour. Everyone was very understanding at the time. But that will just kill you in a country when your gigs are cancelled. It was hard on the promoters and hard on my colleagues. It’s taken a lot to build us back up.”

Counting Crows appeared in the wake of the breakthrough of Nirvana in 1991. In the late 1980s, the radio and record industries were famously indifferent to new sounds. Duritz was playing in several different bands that had gained some traction in the local San Francisco scene, but little beyond that. But in the wake of Nirvana’s Nevermind, things started moving very fast.

Labels made a sudden 180 – and went on the hunt for newer, weirder stuff. A lot of them liked the ingratiating but complex song constructions Duritz was producing. In the end, Duritz chose Geffen, home of bands such as Nirvana and Sonic Youth.

Counting Crows’ first album, August and Everything After, became a hit. Duritz has a distinctive tenor, laced with sadness, that gives even his upbeat songs a touch of melancholy. But from the start he used it with a surprising sophistication. Even on the group’s first single, Mr Jones, you can hear him confidently humming and sha-la-laing with an abandon that recalled Van Morrison. That song, and just about every other tune on the band’s first three or four albums, had torrents of evocative lyrics and engaging and sometimes dramatic song constructions.

Counting Crows toured for 18 months in the wake of the band’s success. Duritz has spoken frankly about how the frenzy exacerbated his mental health problems. He found his Berkeley home too overrun with fans to be enjoyable. He decamped to Los Angeles and fell in with the celebrity scene centred around Hollywood’s notorious Viper Room nightclub.

The band’s second album, Recovering the Satellites, saw him exorcising some of stardom’s demons. In the years since, he has delivered solid material, right up to last year’s oddly titled Butter Miracles, The Complete Sweets!.

One of that album’s best songs is Spaceman in Tulsa, which begins as a reflection on the life of a gay musician – a friend of Duritz’s named Tyson – but in typical Duritz fashion finds personal reverberations in the mix as well.

“I was writing about art, in my case rock ’n’ roll,” he said. “You can go through a lot of shit in your life as a young person that’s really traumatic and really scarring. And you can wonder how there’s ever going to be a place for you in the world. For Tyson, it was being a flamboyant gay man; for me, it was dealing with a lot of mental illness and other difficulties.”

It’s a song, in other words, about anyone who finds their calling in random places – like a piano at a uni dorm. “There’s a lot of things people go through,” he says earnestly. “And then you find out there’s a place for you. Rock ‘n’ roll, or any art form, has a place for the oddballs. There’s a world out there where you can live, where it’s OK to be you.”

Counting Crows play Enmore Theatre on April 6