Why The Counting Crows Have Grown From ‘Mr Jones’

The Counting Crows would be forgiven if they didn't feel the same attachment to a song that was released nearly two decades ago.

As frontman Adam Duritz explained to us in a recent interview, while their breakthrough track Mr Jones will always have a place in the band's history, it has taken on a very different meaning in the time since its release.

"When I wrote Mr Jones I was a kid in a bar, wishing I was more famous so that it would be easier to talk to some girls. So my perspective on being famous is very different now 25 later than it was then, because I've been famous for 20 years. I have a lot of different feelings about that than I did then, so inevitably you sing that song differently because you're different. I'm not trying to recreate a moment in time from 20 years ago, I'm trying to express the feelings from those songs the way that I feel about them right now – that way you get a lot of emotion every night rather than a snapshot of some feeling I had a long time ago. That doesn't seem like a very interesting way to play, and I would get very bored playing concerts that way. I don't even know how the recorded versions of those songs go, because I haven't listened to them in a long time. I love those songs, but they inevitably grow because you do.”

Even when the band released August And Everything After: Live At Town Hall - a live version of their debut record in 2011, Duritz said the aim was never to play the songs the way they were first created.

“I think that we've never really aimed to play the songs like on the record – we've never really cared about that – so the songs naturally evolve on their own in lots of different ways. They're probably different even now than they were on that ...Town Hall thing – it just happens. To me, songs are a reflection of how you feel today, and it's an interesting way to filter how you're feeling through a song you wrote a while ago – your perspective on that song changes as you change. So I've always felt very open to letting that happen, and our songs kinda change a lot. Especially those first album songs, because we were such a new band right then that I think some of those songs weren't really ready. I think there's some great songs on that record – if you can call your own songs great – but I think, unlike the other records, that we can play them better now than we did then. I just feel like we were a little green when we made it, but people love it."

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