Counting Crows covers a lot of ground

June 13, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

ABC

Counting Crows, with lead singer Adam Duritz, right, performed earlier this month on “Good Morning America.”

It can be debated whether the Counting Crows are resting on their laurels. However, what’s for certain is the members are perched on other people’s successes with the group’s latest effort “Underwater Sunshine [Or What We Did On Our Summer Vacation].”

Nearly 20 years after the Counting Crows arrived with its multiplatinum debut, “August and Everything After,” the Grammy Award-winning band decided to celebrate its new indie-band status by releasing a collection of 15 covers ranging from Bob Dylan and Gram Parsons to Teenage Fanclub, Travis and more.

The result is oddly enough one of the more Counting Crows-sounding albums by the Adam Duritz-led act in recent times. As unique as that may sound, the singer agrees to a point.

“It probably sounds a lot like a Counting Crows album because when you make a record, songwriting isn’t the main thing you do,” said Duritz, in a recent press conference call. “Most of the work that goes into making a record is turning that sort of skeleton of chords of music into a song. That’s something we all do together, and that takes most of the work. That’s really no different on this album than any Counting Crows album, because that’s still what we did. The only difference is we didn’t limit ourselves to one writer.”

Duritz added that he was surprised the recording of “Underwater Sunshine” was a low-pressure affair among band members. While logic would dictate that the easygoing atmosphere could easily be attributed to the fact the musicians didn’t have to create music as much as reinterpret it to their liking, the real story is that the Counting Crows are alive and well.

It’s been an uneven two decades for the band, which followed up its debut with 1996’s electric “Recovering the Satellites,” 1999’s melodic “This Desert Life,” 2002’s popish “Hard Candy” and its most recent studio effort, 2008’s “Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings.”

During that time, Duritz has also struggled with depression and drug-prescription dependency. Today he’s clean and focused on the band’s affairs, which includes being active on social media.

Not only did he record love songs that he released for free last year on Valentine’s Day, but he also spearheaded the band’s decision to release a few of its “Underwater Sunshine” tracks for free on Bit Torrent. In Duritz’s mind, this represents the new business model for working bands.

“There’s no record cycle anymore, there’s none of that stuff,” Duritz said. “Someone asked me why we’d waited until several months after the release to do the thing with Bit Torrent because wouldn’t it have been smarter to do it right when we put the record out? But my feeling was, like, ‘No, we have all that attention around the release right then.’ The thing about the digital age now is that there is no cycle. You can do stuff whenever you want because you can put stuff out whenever you want.”

Doing whatever they want again on tour is what the Counting Crows have planned for this summer’s “The Outlaw Roadshow,” which comes to Cleveland Monday at Cain Park. The bill features the Counting Crows along with relatively obscure acts Good Old War, Foreign Fields and Filligar.

Duritz said it’s a different mind-set from the band’s previous tour “The Traveling Circus,” which was built around all of the act’s playing together all night long. “The Outlaw Roadshow” was put together in an iPod playlist fashion of sorts featuring under-the-radar underground acts.

More so, Duritz hopes that inspiration is contagious for music fans leaving the show.

“I hope people figure out what I figured out, which is that, wow, music is in great shape and there’s lots of great bands and there’s so [much] music to be enjoyed.”