Counting Crows is back and ready to fly high again.
Think that you loved ’em at one time but have moved on? You might rethink that once you revisit the band’s music on its latest release, “Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did on Our Summer Vacation).” Or, more correctly, listen to the band revisit some of the songs its members most love on this all-covers album.
” ‘Meet On The Ledge’ is great,” said Crows’ frontman Adam Duritz, when talking about the Fairport Convention song covered on the album. “With ‘Meet On The Ledge,’ I don’t know; one day it just occurred to me this would be a really good song to sing. Now once [multi-instrumentalist David Immergluck, who is also a Fairport Convention fan] was in the band, it seemed like a really good song to do together. It just has a great chorus. It’s got great verses to sing. It’s got all the great dynamic to it. It’s both beautiful and fragile, and it also completely kicks ass.”
Listening to Duritz talk about his affection for that and the other songs on the album — plus ones that didn’t make the cut — it is easy to see why Counting Crows still flies high while many other bands that started in the ’90s have vanished. Crows is one band that consistently follows its own musical star. That started even before the band’s 1993 debut album, “August and Everything After,” which included the hit single “Mr. Jones.”
| Onstage |
| Counting Crows |
| When: 7 p.m. Wednesday |
| Where: Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, Filene Center, 1645 Trap Road, Vienna |
| Info: $48 in-house; $30 lawn; 877-965-3872; wolftrap.org |
“I think it still feels very fresh to us,” he said of making music together. “I think that getting that creative control right at the beginning and taking that attitude into everything we did made all the difference in the world, because it never became a repetition of something. It never felt like we were doing something for the hundredth time, and if it did, we just didn’t do it. Like, we made the records we wanted to make, exactly how we wanted to make them.”
The same is true on stage. Fans do gripe, though, on the rare occasion the band doesn’t play one of its much-loved hits.
“They said, ‘You should remember what got you here,’ ” said Duritz of a fan posting on Facebook following a show when the Crows did not play “Mr. Jones.” “But the thing is ‘Mr. Jones’ didn’t get us here. ‘Mr. Jones’ got us on the radio in 1993. ‘Round Here’ [the second single off the Crow’s debut album got us] on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” he said. “But neither of them is really the thing, because what really got us to where we wanted to go was playing shows of songs we wanted to play, so whatever that was.”
