Multi-platinum, Grammy-nominated rock band Counting Crows recently released their long-awaited new album, Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets! which is available everywhere via BMG.

This is the bands first full-length studio release since 2021’s critically acclaimed Butter Miracle: Suite One. The album continues on from the 2021 release with nine tracks that all hold deeply personal lyrics. Each track lends its story to fans who can easily create their own narrative. Listen HERE

As well as releasing the new album, Counting Crows have also announced their World Tour which includes the UK and more of Europe. The tour, titled, The Complete Sweets! Tour, kicks off June 10 in Nashville, TN. The tour will bring Counting Crows’ timeless storytelling, raw emotion, rich melodies and beloved live show to audiences across North America and Europe throughout 2025. Tickets are available at countingcrows.com.

We caught up with Adam Duritz, lead singer of Counting Crows to discuss the album, the tour and more! Adam told us about his love for Taylor Swift’s music, particularly “the one,” which he covered on The Howard Stern show. He talked about the challenges of mixing and mastering his latest album, “Butter Miracle -The Complete Sweets,” which he mostly wrote in a farm in the UK. Adam also reminisced about his favorite UK spots, including record stores and a restaurant in Chelsea.

Enjoy!

Have you had a good week?

I’ve had a busy week. I was in two weeks of like drowning in promo in America, and then we played Howard Stern last Monday, and I was on a flight that night to London. I spent a week in London and Dublin doing promo, and then flew to Vegas and played a gig there Wednesday, and then finally flew home last night. So I just got back to New York, I don’t know, 10 o’clock last night. So yeah, it’s been really, it’s been great, though,

Well, I really appreciate you doing this. Tell me about the Howard Stern show because you did a cover of ‘the one’ by Taylor Swift. Why did you choose to do that song?

I just really love that song. You know, I was a Taylor Swift Fan years ago when she first started recording, and I hadn’t really listened to much in recent years, and my girlfriend really wanted to go to see the eras tour, so we got tickets. I asked her to make me a playlist so I could research, you know, a lot of the records I was less familiar with, and I just got really into it. It was a really long playlist, like, hours, like three, four hours of music. And I listened to it over and over again, and I kept getting really hooked on the songs from folklore and from I’m spacing, what’s the name of the record before that?

evermore was after it if it was that one?

evermore, and I really love that song, ‘the one’, you know, and I then we started touring, and I was really kind of fascinated with the idea of playing that song, and I was sitting backstage a bunch of times with a keyboard, trying to figure out a way into the song. And then it kind of just happened one day in San Diego, I just sort of was backstage playing piano, and I just sort of found my way into the song, and ever since then, I’ve kind of loved it. Howard wanted a cover and an old song, so I said, Well, why don’t we just do ‘the one’ into ‘long December’, which we’ve been doing in concert a bit. But it went great, I don’t know. I just was like, “well, this would be really cool to play.”. I just kind of love that. So I think it’s a really well written song. That’s a great song.

I’m a huge Swiftie, so I loved it, and I really hope for it to be on the set list in the UK.

Oh, I imagine it will. I’ve been really loving playing it. I’m, like, completely addicted to playing it. Also, there’s this great moment like, you know, when we’re playing, there’s like, 10,000 people, 20,000 people opening for Santana. And there’s this moment where I start ‘the one’, and it takes two or three lines before anyone realizes what it is. And then there’s just this chorus of high pitched 16 year old screams that happens like, whoever’s there at the show, like their daughters are like, “this is our song”, you know? I just get a big kick out of it that moment. You know?

I love that! So tell us about coming over because I know it’s a while away yet but do you play any different songs over here than you do at home because UK fans are deep cut people, but so are your OG fans.….

It’s a different set list every night. I mean, we don’t make the set list for a given concert until after dinner sometimes. So, I mean, it’s different every night, not just from country to country. So I don’t even know what we’re going to play on the next show, let alone three months from now. So yeah, I mean, you know, depending on where you are, you get a feeling for what you want to play. For us going over there is like this reverse Beatles thing. It always reminds me of when I was a kid, like seeing those news footage of the Beatles coming to America and like it, it just feels really special. It’s one thing to be a local band and then get in your car, your van, and drive from San Francisco to LA or to Phoenix and play a show. It’s another thing to cross an ocean and to realize that people are going to come see you play on a different continent, that’s just really cool, and that’s still really cool. I was so excited the first time we flew to London to play a gig. I think we played the borderline. I can’t remember the name of it, you know. And it just was so fucking exciting. And it’s still really cool. Like, you know, we’re gonna come there and on November 1st or 2nd, we’re playing Wembley, you know, I mean, holy shit, we’re playing Wembley again. Like, that’s just really fucking cool. I don’t know how to say it other than that, it just is. It’s like, you know, we grew up in San Francisco, and it’s, I don’t know, 8, 10 thousand miles away, and people are going to come out and they’re going to watch us play in Wembley. How wild is that? It’s like, that’s when you know you’ve really made it. When you didn’t just drive there. You know, when you couldn’t drive there, you had to fly or take a boat, you know?

Do you have anything that’s completely different on your UK rider, you or any of the band, really? Because obviously you won’t have everything that we have in the UK, in America.

I mean, the rider is pretty simple. It’s like wine, beer, diet coke, sandwich meats, bread, peanut butter and jelly. There’s not a lot of wild stuff on some. Most of it is pretty convertible from the US to England or Australia or Germany or wherever. You know, the bread’s different, the meats are different but beer and wine, they have them everywhere, and they’re better in Europe a lot of the time. So no, I don’t think there’s anything particularly different. It’s easier to get the tea. We all drink Barry’s, which is an Irish tea so we generally drink Barry’s and that’s easy to get in England, but it’s not that hard to get in America either. We order crates of it before the tour, so it’s easy to have it over there. It’s much easier to find barakah in England than it is in America. So that’s kind of easy. That’s not on the rider, but you know, it’s right there at Boots. So it’s easy to get.

Let’s talk about ‘the Complete Sweets’. You wrote a lot of that in England? I believe in the English countryside?

The whole record was written in England, except for one song. I did some rewriting in America but other than ‘with love, from A to Z’ the entire record was written on a farm in England.

Did you face any challenges making the complete album?

I did a bunch of rewriting for the like side A. I’ve never done that before, but I realized that some of the songs weren’t really good enough, and I reworked them. We ran into a real challenge after we recorded. The recording was really quick and easy, but we mixed it and then mastered it, and I left for tour last summer, and all tour long, I was like, “I don’t know about these mixes” and I was really nervous about telling our producer that I didn’t like the mix, I thought he would be insulted. Finally, after the tour was over, I called him and said it to him, and he went, “Oh my god. Thank god” and he said, “I don’t know what’s wrong. They all sounded different when I got home, and I’ve spent this entire summer, like, nervous about telling you that I didn’t think they were good enough.” And I was like, “oh, okay, well, that’s the same thing I was thinking”. So we actually remixed it after that with Chad Blake, who has a studio in Wales. And then it turned out great, but there was a real struggle with that, because we were both separately, thinking the mixes weren’t good enough. Oh, now I think they sound great.

This is probably different for every album. But how do you decide on the bookends of an album? Because the bookends always fascinate me. I love to know why people choose the first song and the last song, and if it has a story behind it.

It’s just got to flow. The second half of the record is set since it’s sweet and it runs in a certain order so it’s like one long piece of music, so there was no question about that. And I always wanted that to be side B. The first time we went through a bunch of different possible opening songs, I had ‘Boxcars’ there at one point, I had ‘Spaceman in Tulsa’. Eventually, ‘With love from A to Z’ just seemed like the signature song on the record, to me, in some ways, and so that ended up being the first song. But yeah, to me, it’s always about how it flows. It has to flow the right way. You have to be able to listen to the whole thing from start to finish, you know. So like, you know, ‘With love from A to Z’ it has a great beginning. ‘Under the Aurora’ is a great way to close the first half of the record, because it’s such an epic moment, and then it leads into the sweet, which has its own order.

Do any of the songs on this album sound completely different? I know you said that you reworked a lot of them, but is there any particular song on the album that sounds so completely different from the writers room to full production to the point that you were like, “wow, I didn’t know it could sound like”.

All the songs as I write, is just this skeleton. It’s just some words and some chords. What I’m hearing in my head is more like the record. So that first thing, you know, a lot of these songs like I had, more of them conceived of in my head. They never really sounded like the way I wanted them to sound when I was playing them on the piano, especially on this record, like nothing on the record is anything like the demo. Oh, maybe ‘Virginia through the Rain’ kind of is in some ways. But these were songs where I had really ambitious ideas about the ways they should sound, you know. So I’ve been really hoping they would turn out the way they did.

Let’s talk about ‘Spaceman In Tulsa’ and ‘with love from A to Z’, because I love what the songs are about..

Well, I mean, space man, is, you know, I think a lot of artists spend their childhood feeling really different from the people around them, and wondering if there’s a place for them in the world, because they feel really different from the other kids. And they are and then I think art gives us a place to be and a way to live where we are different kinds of people. I think it’s just really a song about that, about the way the metamorphosis we go through to really bloom into artists and to become something really really special when we maybe spent our childhood feeling different and less than everybody else. You end up blooming into something pretty, pretty cool in art or whatever. Finding your place in life is a real metamorphosis for a lot of people. ‘with love from A to Z’ is kind of like an updating of ’round here’, to me, in that it’s like ’round here’ was about a guy on the cusp of finding his place in the world, looking out the front door into the world, and wondering how he was going to fit into it. And like, it’s sort of like a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, like where I am right now, this sort of statement of purpose or State of the Union, and I think in a lot of ways, A to Z is that for me now, like a Portrait of the Artist as a middle aged man or whatever I am. At a different point In my life, but examining the whole state of myself and my relationship with the world and my friends and my girlfriend, how I relate to all of that. It doesn’t sound anything like ‘Round Here’, but to me, I associate the two songs together.

Out of your entire back catalog what song would you say is your family’s favorite?

I don’t know. Yeah, my girlfriend really, really, really wants to hear ‘Amy hit the atmosphere’. That’s the one she’s been bothering me about for years. That and before that, it was ‘butterfly in reverse’. But I don’t know about the rest of my family. I have no idea. I’ve never asked them.

When you come over to the UK, because you’ve obviously had a relationship with the UK for many, many years. What are your must go to places, whether it’s a restaurant or a hangout!

There used to be these record stores off of the Portobello Road that we would go to ‘minus zero records’ and what was the other one called? I will tell you in two seconds. (looks it up) They’re gone now unfortunately, they were the most incredible record stores. What are the two called? It was ‘minus zero’ and ‘standout records’. They were these two guys who owned a record store together, and they had a falling out, and they split the company, but all they really did was go to either side of the room. They were still in the same small shop off Portobello Road, and they just went to either side of it. And so there was a small aisle between the two of them. Immer and I would go, and we would spend all day there with those two guys, with them playing us music, introducing us to music, and fighting over us with each other. And we would spend the entire day or a couple days there. I miss that record store so much now. They were so brilliant. Those two guys, Bill Allerton and Bill Forsythe. They were the most incredible music heads. Nowadays, I don’t know. I mean, my friend has a restaurant in Chelsea that I love going to. It’s on Kings Road in Chelsea, I think, and it’s just this great Italian restaurant. It’s one thing I made sure I did in the wash of like, day after day of promo. The only thing I did on my one day off was go to lunch at his restaurant. So if I have time again, I’ll probably do that again. But we’re kind of screwed in London this time, because we have a gig in Portsmouth the night before, and then we drive overnight straight into a London gig. So I don’t even know if we get a day off in London, unless we come early to do some TV shows. We might not even have a day off in London, which would suck.

What is the rarest or most special record that you have in your collection?

I don’t know, because none of them are really rare anymore. I mean, now you just get everything on CD. I struggled to find my copies of , Pet Sounds back in the day, that was out of print for years before I found that. I took this trip to England with my family, and I had a list of records I’ve been wanting to hear my whole life that I’d never been able to find in America and I found them all in England on that trip at used record stores. That was all The Fairport Convention records, all the Big Star records, Richard and Linda Thompson records, the first Modern Lovers album, and a bunch of Billy Bragg records, oh and Thunderclap Newman, I found all those records in used record stores in England, and they were really rare at the time, because you couldn’t even find them in America. They were all out of print in America. So those were really, really special to me at the time, because also, I’d been reading about Fairport Convention and Big Star and Richard and Linda Thompson my whole life, but I’d never actually heard it. So it was just kind of mythical to me. That doesn’t exist anymore, that sort of mystery because you know, we can find anything nowadays online, but at the time, imagine, like, if you’d never heard Pet Sounds, which I hadn’t for years, until I found a copy of that, you know, like the the wonder of opening up a record, really hearing music that you’d only read about. It was really cool.

Yes I miss that too, very much! Thank you so much for today and see you on tour!