Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows talks summer tour, why he tabled the band’s newest music

You can’t list the greatest albums of the 90s without including the Counting Crow’s “August and Everything After.”

It gave us fans “Mr. Jones,” “Round Here,” “Omaha,” and my personal fave, ”Rain King.”

Almost three decades later, the group is bringing back the nostalgia with four shows on the East Coast before they head to the midwest and then Europe.

We chatted with Crows frontman Adam Duritz about the tour and the highs and lows of making new music.

How is it being back on the road?

On the one hand, it’s really great because in a lot of ways our career should have been over a long time ago — bands just don’t last very long. Now we’re coming up on 30 years since our first album and there are still big crowds. It’s amazing and I find myself getting choked up about it during shows in ways I haven’t even thought about in the past. But on the other hand, it’s still weird with the pandemic. Last summer we went out, completely isolated in a bubble. And it was strange not to see any friends on tour. The first set of gigs we did this year, we sort of loosened it a bit and then every single member of the band came home with COVID at the end of the run. So we tightened things up again and we’re back to being isolated.

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Wow, the band has been together for 30 years?

It’s like having brothers. We’ve sacrificed for each other, we’ve come through for each other, so many times on so many nights. When you’re playing live music, you really do catch each other, things happen. If you change something or make a mistake, the band’s there. The amount to which you’re there for each other, I don’t know if most people can understand that if they’re not in it. Most people are not in this job for this long. I just don’t think bands stay together. We know a few bands that stayed together because they’re the ones who’ve been around for 30 or 50 years — like the Rolling Stones. If you think about all the bands that were there when the Stones started, none of them were together two years later either.

You’re among the headliners at Musikfest, which has a diverse lineup this year including Ja Rule and Ashanti, Olga Tañón, Boyz II Men, Ziggy Marley, and Wille Nelson.

That’s the coolest thing about festivals. My favorite memory is performing at [Volks Park in Germany] one year and our guitar player and I went out early and saw De La Soul, followed by Supergrass, followed by Stereophonics, Los Lobos, the Cardigans, Cypress Hill, Coldplay, us, and R.E.M. all on one stage. It was quite a day of music. It’s just the greatest thing because for musicians, music is mostly just music. You don’t think about the different genres as much — musicians just tend to like music. But festivals break that up. They put all these different types of music on one stage and I always find that to be so awesome. The truth is there’s isn’t just one kind of great music. It’s just all this music and people just play it different ways. Good music is good music and I think it would be way cooler if people just listened to music, you know?

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In terms of new music, what have you been working on?

Well I wrote the second half of ”Butter Miracle, Suite One,” and my friend David Le'aupepe [from] Gang of Youths sent me his record before it came out and I just thought my stuff wasn’t good enough.

I’ve never had that reaction before in my entire career. I had [sung] on his record “Angel in Real Time,” and I just realized mine wasn’t good enough. It gave me a prespective, not one that I necessarily needed, but I’m glad I got it. So I’ve gone back to the drawing board.

The Counting Crows perform at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York Aug. 3; Paramount in Huntington, New York Aug. 5; the Stone Pony Summer Stage in Asbury Park, New Jersey Aug. 6; and Musikfest on Monday, Aug. 8 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

For tickets, go to countingcrows.com/tour

Micaela Hood is a features reporter with the Pocono Record and the USA TODAY Mid-Atlantic Region features team. Reach her at mhood@gannett.com

This article originally appeared on Pocono Record: Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows on the band’s new music, summer tour