Adam Duritz & Everything After
The Best…
…Magazine Profile I Read This Week
“Adam Duritz Is Just Happy to Be Anywhere” — by Grayson Haver Currin, GQ, May 8, 2025
To begin, let me first acknowledge the awkward truth — a lot of people hate Counting Crows. Or they at least think the band’s lead singer and songwriter, Adam Duritz, is totally and utterly ridiculous.
My friend Keefe, for example, is among the most amiable people I know. He’s always down for anything and likes pretty much everything. It’s noteworthy, then, that I can name only one thing that he truly hates: Counting Crows.
So I know I’m wading into controversial waters by taking on this most taboo of cultural subjects.
But Grayson Haver Currin’s illuminating profile in GQ, “Adam Duritz Is Just Happy To be Anywhere,” suggested to me by reader Aaron C., beautifully explains how and why Duritz became such a polarizing pop culture figure and reminded me of why I once loved his band.
Before I was a Counting Crows fan, I was a hater, too.
Back in early 1994, a few months after their debut album August and Everything After came out, I didn’t know any of their songs. All I knew was that the band’s video for its debut single, “Mr. Jones,” was seemingly on a 24/7 loop on MTV, crowding out whatever other videos I actually wanted to see.
Who were these guys, anyway? Or more to the point, who was this guy? The lead singer was clearly the star of the operation, and he had kind of a strange look — a doughy white guy with dreadlocks wearing a Davy Crockett-style suede fringe jacket, singing into an old-timey microphone?
Get this guy outta here.
The ubiquity of the video annoyed me to the point that I didn’t bother listening to any of the band’s songs.
Until… I started going to a new school.
In the late-summer of 1994, as an incoming high school sophomore, I transitioned from the private day school I had attended for 10 years to the local public high school.
Suddenly, I was a “new kid” in an unfamiliar environment, a place where the size of my class ballooned from 23 kids to 300. And where, for the first time in my life, I had to negotiate the social politics of the school cafeteria.
It was all very daunting.
In those early days at Amity High School, I wasn’t in tune with myself enough to identify the feelings of loneliness, fear, and self-consciousness I was experiencing. But, judging by the copious amounts of sweat that started pouring from my underarms, my body sure knew what was going on. (Puberty probably also played a role in that.)
I certainly wasn’t paralyzed by any of this — I made some friends, did pretty well in my classes, and started writing for the school newspaper — but I also spent a lot of time alone in my bedroom.
There, once I finally gave Counting Crows a chance, the climate was perfect for Adam Duritz’s emo-ness to blow into my life like a storm of vulnerability and yearning.
To my teenage ears, his songs combined a cinematic lyrical style with the soul of Van Morrison and the intensity of Darkness on the Edge of Town-era Bruce Springsteen. But he wasn’t an Old Master like Van or Bruce. His was a voice from the present, someone who could have been my brother.
When he sang about a recurring character named Anna, I felt like I knew — and loved — her too. The idea of being “asleep in perfect blue buildings” soothed me when I wondered, “How am I gonna keep myself away from me?" I wanted to be “The Rain King.”
The band’s follow-up album, Recovering the Satellites, came out in 1996, and its harder classic rock riffs, coupled with Duritz’s musings on fame and self-loathing, scratched an even deeper musical itch for me.
But I’ll admit, being a fan got difficult.
After he became famous, Duritz was derided for his short-lived celebrity romances, most notoriously with “Friends” stars Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox. His biggest strength as a songwriter and performer — his vulnerability — became a weapon critics used against him. He was too whiny, too corny, too earnest. He definitely wasn’t cool.
Who likes an uncool rock star?
That made it tough to be too public about being a fan. Which is why everything I’ve written here feels like a confession.
Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. I was a Counting Crows fan.
And so, when I reached my twenties, I just kind of moved on from them and never returned.
But that’s where this GQ profile comes in. Reading about the feelings and life experiences that went into Duritz’s music brought me back to my teen years, giving me a greater understanding of why his work meant so much to me. Turns out, he came by his un-coolness pretty honestly.
As he explains in the story, when he was growing up, his family moved around a lot, so he was frequently a “new kid” in school. He had trouble making lasting relationships with people, an issue that persisted into adulthood. As a young man, he began to struggle with mental illness. Becoming one of the most famous people in the country almost overnight did very little to help that (but did make him wealthy).
That was a powerful cocktail that drove both his interpersonal self-consciousness and his artistic creativity. The isolation, yearning, and pain aren’t subtext in the songs — they’re right there on the surface. Perhaps for the critics, it was too much emotion to comfortably handle. Or maybe they just found him too annoying.
“I’m really bitter about how people treated us, how people disregarded the music and wrote about me as a celebrity,” he says now. “But most of my friends, at one point or another, broke up their bands. We’re still here.”
Duritz is 60 now. His signature dreadlocks, what he calls “the mask I needed to wear to be myself,” are gone. After years of wrestling with his various demons, he appears to have found some peace, love, and happiness. He’s in the longest romantic relationship of his life (eight years). And this month, a new Counting Crows album is out, Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!
I’m not ashamed to say it: I’m here for it.