Adam Duritz of Counting Crows Speaks About His Struggles With Mental Illness
We all know that being a successful musician is not always the key to happiness. The life on the road has taken the soul of many of the biggest names in pop music history. In a new interview, Adam Duritz of Counting Crows opened up about how his fame not only masked his mental illness, but also contributed to it.
The interview was intended to promote Counting Crows’ new covers album, ‘Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did On Our Summer Vacation),’ which was released last week. After a few questions about cover songs, the discussion turned to Duritz’s internal demons, which has long been a part of his lyrics.
“There was a part of me that thought it didn’t matter if I was ever happy,” Duritz told the AV Club. “Because I was making music and making a mark and I was going to be remembered and that seemed to be everything. I really wish I worked a little harder on being sane when I was younger, instead of letting this mental illness get more and more entrenched, because that has f—– up my life. I don’t know what the f— my excuse was for letting it happen, but it did.”
Duritz also expressed a degree of ambivalence about whether or not he will write another song. “I’ve said a lot of stuff about my life over the last 20 years,” he said. “If I stopped and didn’t say anything else about my life from now on, I still will have said plenty…I certainly don’t think at any point in my life I’d say what I just said to you about not writing any more songs, which isn’t really what I think I would do. But it never occurred to me before. There are other musicians whose songs are good enough to take up the rest of my life, for the rest of my career, if I want to.”