Adam Duritz: 1991 and Everything After

We built a studio in a house, and we got in a circle, and we played and played and played and listened to each other. I didn't even sing. T Bone Burnett [the album's producer] played acoustic guitar and sang. I played harmonica, which I can't play but anyone can actually play as long as you're in the right key. And so I stood there and played harmonica until it felt like the way it was supposed to breathe. And then I went back to singing and we played the song. But it was like, man, it was brutal. The first album, oddly to me, is the most produced, slickest of the albums. Because I hadn't learned to do it and be raw yet.

By the second album, when we'd been on the road for a long time, we had Dan [Vickrey] in the band, and Ben [Mize] was the drummer, this Athens, Georgia, guy, he came from much more like a punk, indie background. And we could rock, which is what I wanted. I wanted to play "Round Here," but I wanted to catapult "Angels of the Silences." To go from "Raining in Baltimore" to "A Murder of One" is a jump. It's not like "Round Here" from "Rain King" is a jump. It's not like "Round Here" from anything is a jump, you know. I always like those songs where it's just one set of chords and you can still manage to make a whole song out of it. "Round Here," "Goodnight Elisabeth." No chord changes. It still works, you know.

I had a total breakdown in order to make the record. So did everybody. People think I'm a control freak because I'm in the studio a lot of the time. I do it because I hate the thought of making someone else do something I should have done and then they put all this work in and I tell them it's not good enough, I'll fix it later. T Bone did like, four records while we were doing our record, so he wasn't always there, which made it hard because we didn't know how to make a record. And so we'd work all day and then he would come in and be, "No." And his suggestion was brilliant.

Counting Crows' early influences:

You don't really play like people; you just learn lessons from people. I bought Chronic Town, the first R.E.M. EP, and I wrote my first song in the same semester, that fall. R.E.M. taught me that you can just play as a group, that it's impressionistic. You don't even have to sing words; you can just feel it and it works, if you can all hear each other and feel it together. That band was so good that [Michael Stipe] didn't sing real words and you knew what he meant. Van Morrison taught me about freedom in the moment of singing. All that matters is where you are at that absolute moment you're singing. You watch The Last Waltz and you could see that they're listening to each other so intently when they play that they react to moments in each. You know, and they're like breathing in and out of each other on stage. It's wild to watch, you know.

You know, I grew up in Oakland with all this funk — P-Funk, the Commodores, Funkadelic. I had this real sense of rhythm. And I am not a poet. My words are so wedded to bouncing off the drums, the rhythm of a song, the groove of it.