Why Can't Adam Duritz Get Any Respect?

As recently as 2006, Duritz wasn't sure he would ever sing again. At that point, it had already been four years since the Crows' last studio album, Hard Candy. "All of our records are, like, you're driven to do this because you have something to say," Duritz says. "But I didn't want to say anything for years. I was afraid to say anything again. I went crazy."

Duritz, the son of two doctors, had plunged deeper than ever into what he now acknowledges is a lifelong mental illness. Recently, a new psychiatrist diagnosed the main problem as a dissociative disorder, which can cause sufferers to feel detached from reality. Duritz says the condition left him unable to connect with other people for years, from girlfriends to his family. "This thing would happen to me with every person I'd ever gone out with — just like a shutdown where you can't feel anything," Duritz says. "There was nothing I knew how to do that was gonna fix my ability to have any kind of connection with another person."

He now traces the disorder back to two terrifying moments from his youth. At age fifteen or sixteen, he looked into the mirror and didn't recognize the person he saw. And at around age twenty-one, he had what felt like an acid flashback that he says lasted an entire year. He's been afraid to do drugs ever since. "The world was unreal. It didn't look right," he recalls. "It's never gone away. It looks that way right now to a certain extent. But it just doesn't scare me anymore."

Duritz had been getting heavier and heavier over the years, which he blames on a bad mix of psychiatric medicines. "I endured ten years of fat jokes," he says. By 2006, he weighed 250 pounds. He was depressed, anxious, reclusive. "A year and a half ago, I was in bed," he says. "I hadn't left bed in a long time."

Duritz has since lost fifty or sixty pounds (thanks in part to a diet heavy in protein cookies), and with the help of therapy and new meds, he's found some hope and sanity. When he ended a monthlong relationship on New Year's Day, the breakup was less shattering than any he'd had before — he hasn't even written a song about it yet. "There is a huge difference in my reaction to it," he says. "I am very, very sad, but I'm not depressed. I lost her and I'm OK." He thinks he's ready to get married and have kids — if he can ever get off the road long enough to meet someone and stick around. "I can care now, so I want to care," he says.

Last year, Duritz regrouped with Counting Crows to record a fine fifth studio album, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, which tells the story of his recovery while recapturing some of the rubbed-raw emotional and musical impact of the band's earliest work. "We really tried to go for something hard emotionally, for the first time in a long time," says Crows keyboardist Charlie Gillingham, whose organ playing provides much of the band's rootsy soul. "We can make pop music, but that's not the part of the band that I love. I love us when we're dramatic."

That same side of Counting Crows accounts for their surprising popularity among emo bands, who tend to cite them as an early influence: In 2004, a bunch of emo and screamo groups even recorded an entire tribute album to the Crows. More recently, Panic at the Disco have covered "Round Here," and Dashboard Confessional's Chris Carrabba recorded a duet with Duritz. "It took some sack," Duritz says, "for these guys to tell people who think we suck that we're their favorite band."