Counting Crows' Adam Duritz: Music for an Ogre

Lead singer for Counting Crows Adam Duritz usually writes very personal, thoughtful tunes for albums like Hard Candy, This Desert Life and Across a Wire. He doesn't usually write a song on demand but took on the challenge to pen an original love song for the animated film Shrek 2. The song is "Accidentally in Love", is performed by the band and plays over an opening montage of Shrek and Princess Fiona's honeymoon. Duritz was totally thrown when we mentioned that it might be an Oscar contender for best song. He commented that fans are shocked that his musical faves range from Miles Davis to Mandy Moore and Justin Timberlake.

The friendly musician bopped into our interview at the posh Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel (which is actually pictured in animation in the film) with his usual bouncy pile of Rasta curls high atop his head.

TeenMusic: Apparently you were very surprised to be asked to write this song.

Adam: We just generally mope. I don't usually write on demand and we're a little mopey on demand, but I was going to get married at the time, I was falling in love, so it worked out.

TeenMusic: So the song was a reflection of you at the time?

Adam: All my songs are, where I am. They were very clear about not writing a song about Shrek. Jeffrey Katzenberg sat me down and said look, "Do not be writing a song about a bunch of cartoons." We don't think of them as cartoons, we think of them as people and this is a real situation that they're in, aside from the large greenness. But uh, he said the best thing to do is write a song about yourself, write a song about how you feel and hopefully we can work it into the movie, so I did.

TeenMusic: Is this the first time you've written for film?

Adam: No, I've done many.

TeenMusic: Do the Crows change with new material?

Adam: I don't really think about it at all. Art is just an expression, it's something you do because you need to express yourself. You take what's going on on the inside and put it on the outside, that's just who you are. I just write songs because I feel a certain way. When you've got a bunch of them, that's an album. They're all different.

TeenMusic: You put out a greatest hits album. Does that mean that this is kind of a summing up of your career?

Adam: (laughing) It means I'm really lazy. Truth is, you make albums, and some of those songs are hits, and some of the greatest hits albums have songs that weren't hits. You have a career, the reason why we're still around 10 years is that we do have successful songs.

TeenMusic: What do you find to be the differences between movie biz and music biz?

Adam: There just is exponentially more money in the movie business than in the music business. As a result there are more people involved in the creative process. It's much more by committee, with exceptions. This (Shrek experience) is a big rare thing, to have people have great latitude in creativity. I don't think Jeffrey Katzenberg really lets this happen too often. For a movie this size, to make a movie soundtrack with this eclectic collection of songs, they have enough confidence in the movie itself, so they let Chris (Douridas, the Music Supervisor for the film) find songs that are just good, that just help those scenes in the movie, that make the film better every time they come on.

TeenMusic: Are you branching out in your musical career, Adam?

Adam: Yeah. I'm trying to do some other stuff right now. I'm trying to write some children's songs. My sister had kids and my friend Mary Louise just had a baby and they're on my a** every day to write a children's record. I have to listen to a few albums, to find out how they're done. I wrote a lullaby, because that was obvious.

TeenMusic: Didn't the Dreamworks and PDI folks give you any feedback on "Accidentally in Love"?

Adam: They gave me the basic directive. What I got back from them was they love the song. It wasn't a bunch of suggestions of how to make the song better, they said 'we love the song and the single version can be whatever you want it to be, but for the movie, because of things that have to happen at certain beats, can you speed it up a bit?' I'd have to have things hit, I'd have to have the bridge hit right here in "Accidentally in Love" right when he's hanging upside down and she kisses him. It was just stuff about making timing work, because in a regular movie you can cut the movie to the song, but you can't do that in an animated movie...they really gave me all this freedom, it was interesting and fun to do.

TeenMusic: How do you feel about the internet music downloading problem?

Adam: The Internet is an enormous hole in the dike and a lot of money is pouring out of it, and we've lost 50 percent of our business in the last few years and it's much harder to make a living that way and there's nothing much you can do about it. The record companies were just way way too late to react to it. They have alternatives now, but now if you feel like paying for it you do...you can either look at it as hole in the dike or you can look at it as a conduit between you and your fans... we have a website, I read all the things on the message boards as much as I can, I give them updates as much as I can. It's such a corporate business music, and it's fading away in some ways, and anything you can do about that, it helps the fans.

TeenMusic: What are you listening to lately?

Adam: Last week I was listening a lot to the Ryan Adams album "Rock and Roll," and I just went through the Miles Davis box set, and that's my favorite records of all time just about, oh and I spent a lot of time on Jurassic Five last week. I like that. My tapes are very varied, I don't use it for inspiration, it's that I'm a junkie.

TeenMusic: You read the message boards on your website and comment. What disagreements do you have with your fans?

Adam: We have an antagonistic relationship with fans sometimes. Fans are as narrow-minded as anyone else. Your fans have been taught by the media unfortunately, that this is cool, and this is not. They've created this antagonism between what's cool and not cool, it's weird that people and their involvement with music is how they see themselves, it's attached to what's cool in their lives in a way other things are not. I am on there saying 'hey I don't care what you think, the Justin Timberlake album is fantastic'. I say 'you're idiots, forget your prejudices. It's brilliant'.

TeenMusic: Is there anyone else you like that your fans attack you about?

Adam: I think that Mandy Moore's "Coverage" album is fantastic. She took 12 of my all time favorite songs and I asked her how the hell did she make a record with that many obscure songs and she paid for it with her own money and turned it in when she was done and that's the last thing she did for Epic records. These are 12 great songs. The fans and I had a huge fight about that, and they think that I'm a big sellout because I listen to Mandy Moore We have arguments like that all the time. I want to be me, and not be their best friend. I want to tell them about my music, I want to tell them about a film I like, I want to tell them about how I feel on a given day. They take exception to a great deal of what I say.

TeenMusic: But, they like your songs!

Check out the Counting Crows website www.countingcrows.com And catch Adam and the band on 5/26 on The Late Show with David Letterman (CBS) and 5/28 on The Today Show (NBC)

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.