For a guy who’s built a career out of being introspective, Adam Duritz might have hit a new peak on Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets—by having a full-blown existential crisis over five songs. “They weren’t good enough,” he says of the tracks that make up the second half of the suite. “They were okay songs. But not great. Not up to that level.” The level, in this case, was set by Angel in Real Time, the bar-raising record by his friends in Gang of Youths. “I’d never had that happen before,” Duritz confesses. “I always know when they’re great. But this time… I didn’t.”
So instead of sending the songs to the band, he sat on them. For two years. “It kind of shattered my confidence,” he says. “I just kept looking at them and feeling like there was something wrong.” This from the guy who gave us “Anna Begins,” “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby,” and “Round Here.” But apparently even Counting Crows’ frontman can second-guess his gut when it comes to a pandemic riff that began, no joke, with him wandering around the house singing “coronavirus, coronavirus, coronavirus” to a mock-Buckcherry-by-way-of-Zeppelin glam stomp.
The riff became “Boxcars.” It rips. But it took a full band intervention and a week of home cooking from Duritz to get there. “I had the idea but I couldn’t even play it to write it,” he says. “So I called the band and said, ‘I need you guys to come stay with me. I need to know if these are any good.’” Spoiler alert: they were. Once the band jumped in, “every song kept coming out like ‘oh my god, this sounds killer.’”
Still, the four-year gap between Suite One and Suite Two wasn’t exactly part of the plan. “It really bothers me,” he admits. “It made everything a long time.” But the results speak for themselves. From the pulsing rush of “With Love from A to Z” to the sneering guitars of “Boxcars” to the six-minute mini-epic “Under the Aurora,” the new songs hit harder than anything Duritz has written since Recovering the Satellites. “That’s what I was going for,” he says. “Rock guitars. Driving. Closer to Satellites.”
Duritz is the rare artist whose fans obsess over the connective tissue in his lyrics like they’re in a graduate lit course. Characters like Maria, Elizabeth, and Bobby aren’t just names—they’re recurring ghosts, flickering in and out of song titles and choruses across decades. “Bobby is me,” Duritz says plainly. “In ‘Elevator Boots,’ in ‘Spaceman in Tulsa,’ in ‘Bobby and the Rat-Kings’—it’s all me. Sometimes the rock star, sometimes the fan. But me.”
Even songs that didn’t make the albums—like “Margery Dreams of Horses” or “Einstein on the Beach”—still echo across the fanbase. Just don’t expect him to feel the same way. “‘Einstein’ is clever,” he says, “but it doesn’t mean a lot to me. We only ever played it once live—and we fucked it up.” Meanwhile, “Marjorie” has structure problems, he says. “It goes somewhere, confidently, but that somewhere is a kind of a nothing section.”
Counting Crows have never done a B-sides album, partly because Duritz doesn’t write that many extra songs. “I’m not Springsteen. I don’t have a vault. When I write, I usually write just what we need. Maybe one or two extras.” He blames a lack of songwriting on the road—“I don’t play guitar, and I play piano badly”—but says that when he does write, it comes in concentrated, obsessive bursts. “I wrote all the songs on Suite One on a farm in West England. Then went home and wrote all these. And then rewrote them.”
That rewriting, it turns out, unlocked something. “I had never composed anything that internalized the way we stretch songs live, not until ‘Palisades Park,’” he says. “That led me to the suite. These short songs that flow like one long piece. I think it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever done.”
Thematically, the whole thing holds together with surprising weight—especially considering how long the songs sat in limbo. “It’s about people who are ostracized and isolated,” Duritz says. “Growing up gay in parts of this country, growing up as a girl and how men treat girls. It’s about being different and how we treat people who are different.”
Asked if the years-apart halves of Butter Miracle still feel of a piece, Duritz doesn’t hesitate. “Same person wrote them. And two of those years were the pandemic, so there weren’t a lot of new experiences to change my brain.” But he’s still chasing growth. Still trying to write something worthy of the shelf next to “Anna Begins.” “Every record,” he says, “is just a picture of me over a few years.”
This one, clearly, had a lot going on in the frame.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
