Interviewer: Counting Crows Playing Live on Radio 1 and that was Round Here. You specialize in the quiet endings, Adam, it would seem.
Duritz: It's a Bad Habit
Interviewer: Dramatic Affect
Duritz: Just can't think of anything else to do
Interviewer: Can you tell us a little bit about the history of the Crows, when they got together
Duritz: A couple years ago, two years ago
Interviewer: And your all from around the San Francisco Bay Area
Duritz: Yeah, I live in Berkeley, a couple guys in San Francisco, three guys in Oakland
Interviewer: And had you been writing songs before the band got together
Duritz: Yeah, I'd always written songs, most of them sucked
Interviewer: The album doesn't sound like a debut album, it sounds so assured, had you been touring a lot with these songs before you recorded the record?
Duritz: No, not really, I don't understand when people say that, I don't find it to be an assured album, I think it's very emotional, for me its everything I wanted it to be. I don't know what they expected it to be, I suppose what they mean by that, is that they expected it to be crappy in some way. But we worked real hard at it, we feel very deeply about these songs, they mean so much to me, I wouldn't have put it out unless it was this way.
Interviewer: And the reaction to the album, um, it seemed just to get its own momentum going, no big shining from the record companies, it seemed for us over here.
Duritz: Well we just released it, we didn't do anything that release it and start touring. We've been touring for 6 months straight, a few weeks off here and there. We've been on the road since end of August, beginning of September. We played with the Cranberries for a while, Cranberries and Suede, a bunch of little shots on our own, and then with Cracker for a long time. So I think that's why it sort of developed a power of its own after a while, because we did it by touring, and the more you go around and around the more the radio stations pick it up, the more the people you know get a hold of it, see it, buy it.
Interviewer: And the stage you've reached now, are you surprised by that, or do you think its just a natural way things have been evolving.
Duritz: Oh no, its much bigger than I though it would be, I just hoped we would get a couple hundred thousand so it wouldn't be a huge dissappointment to everybody, I figured as long as we did that it would be fine, because to me the album it beautiful, its everything we wanted it to be. So regardless of whether or not it was a big hit right now, ten years from now, it would still be a great record, you know, because i didn't want the hype, I just wanted to tour. And I thought that we'd be able to do it gradually this way over the course of several records we'd build a following, you know it will work real well this way. I'd hope to, like I said, a hundred thousand records, we sold a hundred thousand records this week.
Interviewer: You getting nervous now.
Duritz: It's just, things change when you do that, people, you know, they want things of you that they might not have asked of you otherwise, like it's a business, it is, and it's not for me, but it is, and there's a lot of that stuff that gets involved in everything, a lot of that starts to sift in whne you start selling a lot of records, and suddenly they see the chance for great deals of money, and then things change a bit.
Interviewer: The pressure starts.
Duritz: Yeah
Interviewer: Can you handle that?
Duritz: No, I don't actually think so, I've been thinking about it recently, there are parts of it that I just dislike so much that a, I don't know, it a strange thing, it means such a different thing to me than it owuld mean to people in the business, even though I see that they love our record, they still don't hesitate to ask you, We've got to go play top of the pops this week, and I don't want to do it. I have a, I feel very uncomfortable with it, I don't believe in miming your songs on TV, I don't know, it's not a moral thing, I just don't feel comfortable doing it, I feel very uncorfortable, I feel silly doing it, and I'm that way, it's why I'm a good singer.