‘It’s a Happy Time’: Counting Crows Return With ‘The Complete Sweets!’

Back during the summer of 2021, Adam Duritz said he was in the process of “tightening up” the songs for the follow-up to Counting Crows’ then-new Butter Miracle, Suite One EP. “When it’s right, we’ll get in and record them and put them out, and then play them (live), which is always the best part,” he told us.

But Duritz didn’t expect to take four years, almost to the day, for that to happen.

Butter Miracle, The Complete Suite Sweets! comes out Friday (May 9) as Counting Crows’ eighth full-length studio album. It includes the four songs from Suite One, plus an additional five — the four Duritz was talking about during 2021, plus the opening “With Love, From A-Z,” which came later. He and the band are certainly happy with the result, but Duritz acknowledges it did not come easily.

“I really thought I’d finished the (new songs),” Duritz, who’d written the material at the same friend’s farm in England where he composed the Suite One songs, tells Billboard via Zoom. On the way back home to New York, he stopped in London to sing on Gang of Youth’s 2022 album Angel in Realtime, which he calls “one of my favorite things anyone’s done in the last 10 years.” That, in turn, changed his perspective on what he thought was going to become Suite Two. 

“I was suddenly thinking these songs I just finished aren’t good enough,” Duritz acknowledges. “They’re missing some stuff.” He felt one, “Virginia Through the Rain” was “perfect,” but the others were lacking. “I kind of had lost confidence in them,” Duritz notes, “and I sat on them for a good two years. then I wrote ‘With Love, From A-Z’ here (in New York) and thought, ‘That’s great — now I have to figure out what to do with this, ’cause it needs to go on a record right away!’ I’ve got to shit or get off the pot on these songs.”

The solution, he found, was to gather some of his bandmates — multi-instrumentalist David Immergluck, bassist Millard Powers and drummer Jim Bogios — to his home New York and woodshed those songs that had been put aside. 

“The problem was that my sort of ambition for what they should sound like outstripped my ability to actually play them on the piano,” Duritz says. “I’m really good at arranging and singing, no doubt. I’m great at being in a band, but I’m not the player some of the other guys are, or that a lot of other songwriters are.

“So the guys came to the house and we went through them one by one and we loved them. They became great…and then we went into the studio only a few weeks later and knocked the record out in 11, 12 days — It’s by far the fastest we’ve ever recorded (an album) — but it took forever to do it!,” he adds with a laugh.

The Complete Sweets! new songs certainly demonstrate the merits of that extra effort. Taken as piece with the Suite One tracks they offer a Counting Crows amalgam, from the Band-like earthiness of “With Love, From A-Z” and “Virginia Through the Rain” to the sweeping, string-laden build of “Under the Aurora,” the power pop of the single “Spaceman in Tulsa” and the gritty guitar rock of “Boxcars,” which Duritz says was particularly challenging until he brought the other players in. 

It is not a narrative, but The Complete Sweets! is certainly a conceptual whole. “I wasn’t trying to write a specific story,” Duritz notes. “But (the songs) just sort of fit together for me. I just felt like this was a little world I was creating, and it felt very fertile.” The songs find him expressing himself mostly through characters — which he started in earnest on 2014’s Somewhere Under Wonderland — than in the angsty first-person that was once Duritz’s stock in trade. In particular, the protagonist of “Spaceman in Tulsa” is clearly there in Suite One’s “Bobby and the Rat Kings,” which is the closing track on The Complete Sweets! and links the two groups of songs together. 

“It’s definitely thematically tied together; I think (the ‘Spaceman’) did end up in ‘Bobby and the Rat Kings’ for sure,” Duritz acknowledges. “But I think even without that, that song would work even if there was no connection. But I wanted the connection to be there, ’cause I was vibing on that. I was digging writing about Bobby on this record. I think there are a lot of us like that in the arts who grew up wondering if we had a place in the world, wondering how we were going to fit in. We felt different from other people. We field weird.

“I think there’s a world of people who work in our heads, and when we find that it’s like we get to be the butterflies instead of just the caterpillars.”

Counting Crows asserted its place in the world during the 90s, after Duritz and guitarist David Bryson began working as an acoustic duo in the San Francisco Bay Area. With its filled-out lineup, Counting Crows generated buzz by playing in Van Morrison stead’s at his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction during January of 1993 — seven months before the release of its seven-times-platinum debut album, August and Everything After and its band-defining hits “Mr. Jones,” “Round Here” and “Rain King.” Since then, Counting Crows has sold more than 20 million records worldwide and was nominated for an Academy Award for “Accidentally in Love” from Shrek 2 in 2004. 

This year, meanwhile, marks the 20th for the current lineup, since “new guy” Powers joined in 2005. 

“I always wanted to be in a band and stay together,” says Duritz. And even though he’s worked outside the band on a variety of projects — with the Wallflowers, Ryan Adams and other acts as well as films such as Josie and the Pussycats and The Locusts, and running a couple of record labels — Duritz contends that, “I never wanted to be a solo artists. I have no interest in that shit. It’s a hard thing to stay together as a band, and it’s not surprising to me we’ve lost a couple people over 30 years, but right now it feels like we can go on forever — except I know that nothing works that way, y’know?”

Nevertheless, Counting Crows is gearing up for its Complete Sweets Tour!, which kicks off June 10 in Nashville and runs through Aug. 23, with Gaslight Anthem supporting. And while forever seems like a big word, Duritz feels confident that the band will be with us for quite a while longer.

“I’m not tired of it at all,” he says. “There were points where I was having more trouble with myself emotionally, and the band’s stress was just too much. But our manager’s great now. Our lawyer’s great. I totally trust everybody. All that stress is gone. The band is so stable and great, and we’re still killing it. 

“So we’re on our way again. Things feel good. Everyone seems to be in a really good place. It’s a happy time — and,” he adds with another laugh, “if even I can be happy, what’s to stop everyone else from being happy, right?”