Counting Crows Return To Australia As Adam Duritz Reflects On New Songs, Longevity, Life On The Road And The Quest For The Perfect Sausage Roll

For more than three decades, Grammy and Academy Award-nominated rock band Counting Crows have enchanted listeners worldwide with their intensely soulful and intricate take on timeless rock and roll. In 2026 they return to Australia and New Zealand with The Complete Sweets! Tour – bringing decades of sing‑along moments, deep cuts, and fresh energy to iconic theatres across both countries. Having delivered some of the world’s most beloved rock songs, from Mr Jones and Round Here, to their cover of Big Yellow Taxi and the Shrek movie/soundtrack hit, Accidentally in Love, Counting Crows returned earlier this year to drop an album of new material, Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets! featuring single Spaceman In Tulsa. Now it’s Australia’s turn with their tour kicking off in Adelaide next Friday Adam Duritz talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

It’s awesome to be able to talk to one of my all-time favourite bands. Absolutely love Counting Crows, and I’m stoked that you’re coming back to Adelaide, playing the Festival Theatre this time.
Yeah, we are too. I’m really glad. I like it. I have friends down in Adelaide, I’m looking forward to it.

So how does it feel to be back in Australia for another tour?
It’s great. Like, one of the best things about being in a band is that you get to go all over the world. I have really good friends here that I, when I was backpacking as a kid, like… when I was twenty-something, my early twenties. I travelled around Europe with two Australian guys and two Australian girls that we met on a boat to Brindisi and then in Corfu. Back then, when you said goodbye, it was like you were never going to see them again, because you couldn’t even call. We’re talking about, like, 1989. It was right before I started Counting Crows, and a long-distance phone call right then cost a fortune, so you couldn’t even talk to your friends from the other side of the world.

Then I end up in a job where I, every few years, I came back here and see them again. It’s the first thing, literally the first night we get here. It’s been thirty… I don’t know, thirty six years now and we just all get together, and we just hang out. The first night I got here, we all hung out and we’re going to do it again tomorrow, and then I’ll see them when I come back to Sydney. I have friends down in Adelaide, it’s the best part about this job. These are beautiful places. I mean, Australia, it’s like every city is Hawaii and then you take off in a plane and you fly over the most dangerous desert in the world where everything could kill you, and then you land in Hawaii again. It’s a different Hawaii especially coming from blizzards in New York. I love that, because I grew up in a place where there were no seasons, and now I live in a place where we have seasons, and I love it. But it’s nice to come here.

What is it about Australian crowds? Do they bring something different to the shows that you don’t really see anywhere else?
No, not really. I mean, I think they’re people like other people. I like people in Australia. They’re very friendly, it’s just a lot of fun. I don’t know if people are really different. I mean, some countries, people clap on the upbeat, and some places people sing along, some don’t, but generally, audiences are audiences.

With a catalogue that goes quite deep, it must be a real nice sort of challenge to have pulling together a set list for an Australian tour?
It’s really just about what do you feel like playing that night? You know, pick a bunch of songs that you’re really excited to play, and the show will be great. Pick a bunch of songs you don’t want to play, people can probably tell. So, to me, I want to be really excited every night for every show. I don’t want to ever play a show where I don’t want to be there. So the main thing is to pick a bunch of songs you want to play, which is really easy. We have so many songs. It’s really kind of fun. We do it after dinner every night. Me and Immy, our guitar player, sit down, and we’re like, well, what do you want to play? And then we just sort of talk about it, and you know what? That seems pretty great and usually on a tour, we have a template, especially when you’re playing a lot of new songs, you got to find places they work in a show. Those are in specific places. The five new songs are in some pretty specific places and then everything else, you just make work around that.

The band’s been together thirty five, thirty six years. What’s the magic that keeps it going so well for so long?
I think part of it is keeping it fresh, like I talk about not playing the same thing every night. But a lot of it is just that we love what we’re doing. When you’re a kid and you dream about being in a band and playing music, you don’t dream about it lasting for two years. Even if you dream about wild success, you don’t dream about having a hit, and then it blows up in two years, and you break the band up, and then you’re a has-been. What you dream about is exactly what we’re doing, and it’s just that it doesn’t happen very often. I think we all appreciate how kind of lucky this is, to get to be still doing it thirty-plus years later. That’s no small thing, it’s pretty rare, and I guess you have to be an idiot or an asshole in life to take for granted something that rare. Not that people don’t, but then that’s why they have the word asshole.

I really love the Butter Miracle. Do you feel like it’s one of those albums that’s opened up a new chapter for the band creatively?
I think it did, you know one of the hard things about writing new material when you get to a certain point in your career is that it’s really depressing to write stuff you love, and make a record you love, and then people don’t want to hear it in concert, or you feel like they’re tolerating you. This is probably the most like an acceptance sort of response that we’ve gotten from new songs. I mean, since maybe our second record, I don’t know that even with all the stuff, like Hanging Around and Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby and Colorblind on Desert Life or Hard Candy and Miami and stuff like that. I’m not sure there’s been an album where the fans were as receptive to the new songs, because we did this album in two parts, and so the side A is five songs long, and we’ve been playing all five songs every night, and audiences are flipping out. Like, I mean, we’re opening with a new song, which we haven’t been able to do since Hard Candy, probably, and we’re opening the encores with a new song, and they’ve just been really, really receptive to it. I don’t know what the reason for that is. I don’t know that it’s better than other records or not, I just for whatever reason, it just really hits with the audiences live and that’s the place where it matters, because you can’t really tell. I mean, you release a record, it may not be a hit, but you can’t tell how much people are really enjoying listening to it on their own. But you can tell at a concert when they’re bored with you. You know what I mean? Like, when they’re tolerating your song at a concert, you can feel it, unfortunately.

I think there’s plenty of life with these songs, and they’ve got such character and emotional weight. They just don’t get tiring at all. I was reading somewhere that you ended up rewriting some of the songs?
Yeah, a lot of them. I wrote the suite a few years back on my friend’s farm in England, and I had been spending a lot of time there. When we decided to make a second half to the record, I wanted to do it in the same place, so I went back there, and I spent a bunch of time by myself on this farm and wrote these songs. On the way home, I stopped in London, because… oh, actually, they’re an Australian band. Some of my best friends are in this band, Gang of Youths, so I stopped in London. David asked me, I had already sung on the record once, but then they dumped the whole record and redid it, and so I went back to do it again. It was Angel in Real Time, and sang on a bunch of it, and then I got home, and a few weeks later, Dave sent me the record. It may have been a little longer than that, but whenever it was, I listened to it, and I was floored. I think that’s maybe the best album anyone’s done in the last ten years. I think it’s an extraordinary, like, ground breaking record.

But when I heard it, the first thing occurred to me was, this is better than the stuff I just wrote, like… there’s a bar, and I’m not sure this stuff is at the same bar that Angel in Real Time is. It was especially when I heard The Man Himself, that song, and I just thought… I’ve never done this before in my entire career. I have never gone back later and rewritten everything because I heard somebody else’s thing. It’s just never happened. But it was really clear to me.

I went back to Spacemen in Tulsa which had, like a verse, a pre-chorus, a kind of post-pre-chorus, and then a chorus, and a post-chorus part. And so, by the time you came around to the verse again, you kind of had just lost all the momentum. I think I’m often writing songs that are just verse-chorus, and I wanted to try and put a little more effort into it on this record, but I kind of overdid it on that song, so I really honed it down, so it went verse, pre-chorus, chorus. There’s a little post music, and it slams back into a verse again. I really tightened that song up and with Aurora, it wasn’t called Under the Aurora then, it was a different… the verses are exactly the same, but I completely ditched the chorus and wrote a new chorus. That chorus might be the best chorus on the record. I didn’t think I changed anything on Virginia Through the Rain. There was three or four more where I did a little work on it. I went back and redid them, and tightened them up, and just edited myself a little harder. Having planned to go over there and write songs in the same place I did the first piece of music, I think I was overly excited to actually finish some stuff, and I went home without really being as diligent about it as I should have. I mean, once I had gone back and I’m really actually thankful for it, because even though it was kind of disheartening, and I’ve never had to do it before, I think it made the record. They were substantive improvements.

But yeah, it was kind of funny to have a friend’s record have such a big effect. It’s funny, there’s a group of us, me and David, Leo Pepe, and Chris Carrabba from Dashboard Confessional, a couple other friends that, we all are sort of friends together, we do send each other stuff when we’re working on things, we send each other demos, and what our new songs sound like, and we bounce stuff off each other. It’s funny, you call them up and you tell them what you think, and you tell them if you think it needs something or not.

I hadn’t been sending my songs to people, but I hadn’t been… maybe because I’m the oldest one of us, people felt intimidated about telling me anything like that, but this time, it had a huge effect on my stuff too, and I think we’re very helpful to each other, and very encouraging to each other, and supportive, but in this one case, man, it was just like, oh yeah, that record’s really good. If I want my record to be really good, I’m going to have to go back and work a little more. Yeah, so it did, it had a big effect.

I’m glad to hear that Gang of Youths are still sort of chipping away in the background, because they’ve gone really, really quiet, for a little while now.
I think they’re working on some new stuff, because Dave was texting me the other day about singing on some songs, so I haven’t heard any of it.

What are the stories behind Spaceman in Tulsa, and even Bobby and the Rat Kings?
Well, I think, you know, Spaceman… I had a friend… the genesis of it was, I had a friend who, a guy named Tyson Mead, who was in a band in the 90s called the Chainsaw Kittens. Great band, alternative band from Oklahoma, and he’s a very flamboyant character. Gay man dressed very much like Bowie, very Bowie-esque character and he grew up in Oklahoma. It can’t have been easy growing up in Oklahoma as that kind of character, you know what I mean? I started thinking about it… but it’s not like it really fucked Tyson up, because he ended up being a great musician. I started thinking about the ways in which art, for me, rock and roll in particular, you don’t have to be like everybody else. You can be a really different person, and it might put you through some really rough stuff when you’re young. But rock and roll makes a place for you and it’s not just music, it’s just in my case it is. It could be any kind of art. You know, like, art has room for oddballs, and people who are different. Life can be pretty rough on those people when you’re a kid. So it’s kind of a wonderful thing to discover a place where you’re okay. Spaceman in Tulsa is about that. It’s not just about Tyson, but that was kind of the birth of it. It’s about a few different people I knew, and myself. I use the character Bobby because I used him on Bobby and the Rat Kings, but it’s really me, you know, that I found my place in the world because I could write songs and play rock and roll.

It has been great chatting and we can’t wait to see you in Adelaide.
Thanks, man, I can’t wait. My friends own this bakery out on Brighton Jetty, and I cannot wait to go back and hang out. They have the best sausage rolls in the world, most sausage rolls are terrible. When I got to Adelaide, Dave actually took me down to visit his friends at Brighton Jetty Bakery, and I had a sausage roll, because I just got to find one that’s good, and it blew my mind. So I’m really looking forward to going back.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Counting Crows on the following dates, tickets from Live Nation…