“If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts.”

“Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby,” Counting Crows

Adam Duritz, frontman for Counting Crows, is on the phone, and he doesn’t sound so well.

“I’m pretty good. Things are fine,” he says in what sounds like if not a lie, then at least a fib, his enunciation barely above a mumble. “I kind of missed a step coming out of the dressing room the other night… Everybody was missing the step. I have a little bit of soreness in my knee.”

That's Adam to the far left.

It’s been 17 years since Counting Crows released the T-Bone Burnett produced, lyrically-infused, emo-rock gem August and Everything After, and Duritz has been bouncing on stage, Jew-dreds a’flailing, ever since. This has been murder on his knees.

“They said we’re going to have to open your knee up or you’re going to lose your lower leg,” Duritz says. “It had been going on for several months and had happened several times, so they were worried about it.”

The four hour shows–33, 34 songs a night–he was doing last tour didn’t help either. He was tearing up his voice so much that he had to go on steroids.

“I sing really hard,” he says. “My voice is a good instrument that does a lot of good stuff. But it’s a fine instrument that doesn’t recover very well. It tends to get worn out and fall off the table. Last summer I cut it up pretty badly.”

But it’s not his somewhat torn up voice, or the pain pulsing from his knee to his inflection, that makes Adam Duritz sound not quite up to par this muggy Friday morning before his show in Portsmouth. He sounds fragile, plaintive, even. He sounds less like a man that has sold over 20 million records, and more like a guy in a room in the Bay Area, writing songs about girls named Anna and boys called the Rain King and dreaming about a time when everybody loves him, so that he can never be lonely.

“My aim was always to be more emotionally open,” he says. “More raw. I think the album with the most amount of sheen on it is August.”

I ask him how he’s been able to maintain, and even build on this emotional availability through all these years of millions, women, praise, and all the other trappings that have ruined countless artists before him.

“[Because of my throat] I don’t have much of a social life after shows,” he says. “I’m not running around bars picking up girls. It’s usually me in a hotel room with a humidifier… We’re not the Rolling Stones, or Aerosmith… I don’t think I’ve changed much as a person. Those things don’t affect your life that way. I knew it at 6 when my mother told me money and popularity don’t mean much. Someone in an audience clapping doesn’t affect you in your daily companionship life.”

CC.

Duritz talks in clean bursts, then mumbles, then more bursts. His voice is distant and almost faded, like he spoke his words into an enveloped, mailed it to me, and I’m just now opening it. Over the phone he sounds very little like the man who, onstage, seems to open his soul to bellow lyrics like, “All my innocence is wasted on the dead and dreaming.”

“You still have to learn to live your life,” he says. “I was really bad at it back then. I have a pretty bad mental illness that makes it tough.”

I tell him I can relate. He goes on.

“I have a pretty bad disassociative disorder,” he says. “It makes it feel like the world isn’t real. It’s kind of scary. It feels like you’re hallucinating part of the time. I don’t know if you’ve ever done drugs, but it’s like that…  you have no control… it’s hard to connect with people.”

I ask him if it makes it hard to believe in people.

“It’s hard to believe they’re there sometimes. Your mind just detaches from people. You don’t connect with people… you don’t make the connections that allow you to stay in love, maintain friendships… I drift at times. Less, nowadays.”

At this point I stop being a journalist, and I’m only a fan. A fan who remembers lying in my bed in high school, feeling like the most fucked up, confused loser in the world, and listening to August and Recovering the Satellites. I listened to those albums and had that critical epiphany of, Okay, so it’s not so easy for everyone.

“How to cross the gulf between you and someone else?” Duritz asks. “It’s the hardest thing to do in life.”

I have to change the subject before I start treating him like my own therapist, or before I find out where he is and go find him to give him a good, long (sincere) hug. I’m surprised to hear that he’s not crazy about his singing on August.

Augustana (and everything after).

“That’s my poorest album as a singer,” he says. “It’s a really good album as a song writer, but I hadn’t sung very much. A lot of those songs… I just wasn’t a great singer. I don’t have any regrets on any records, I didn’t put anything out that was exactly what we wanted it to be… We never let the record company into the studio… I got better at singing through that album.”

On this latest tour, billed as Counting Crows Traveling Circus & Medicine Show, Duritz gets more than a little help behind the microphone. Rather than the standard opening act // secondary act // headliner format, all of the performers are on the stage from the very beginning. The Counting Crows are joined by the band Augustana and hip-hopper NOTAR. Duritz perks up a little when talking about the tour.

“It’s great to be really emotional on stage,” he says, “but it’s also great to throw your head back and sing 10 part harmony at times. It’s like a choir. It’s fantastic.”

Like many good things, this method of performance was inspired by–or at least necessitated by–sex.

“A few years ago a couple of our guys wives got pregnant and they had to leave,” he says. “Augustana was opening and offered to jump in and fill the gaps. It’s not about people being gone, but about everyone being onstage. Everybody come sing. Bring your whole band on stage.

“It was refreshing for everyone’s music.”

Duritz says this isn’t like a lot of shows, where you can show up fashionably late and still catch the headliner’s full sets.

“Do not come late,” he says. “The show starts when it starts. When the curtain goes up, everyone is there. The idea is to give the audience more of a show. If there’s a great band at the beginning of the night you might miss it… I thought, why not just put it all together, have everyone play, make it 2-4 hour show… give them a real rock and roll show?”

He urges fans not to fear the hip hop.

@ nTelos.

“Counting Crows fans come to the show believing they’re not allowed to even like rap, but they leave loving NOTAR. He’s as good a lycricst as anyone I’ve seen in years. He’s blowing up Counting Crows audiences, which is something I never thought I’d see… Actually, I did think I’d see it, since it was my idea to bring him on…”

Based on reviews from the tour, fans can count on a lot from Counting Crows’ early records, as well as a host of crowd-pleasing covers. Duritz isn’t sure what will happen on the nTelos stage tomorrow night. That uncertainty sounds like part of the fun to him.

“I don’t know exactly,” he says. “We make the set list up that day. We were palying “Sweet Virginia” a lot… it’s very fluid, it changes every night. What you’ll see is some outragous harmonies. You’ll discover you do like hip hop music… You’ll hear Counting Crows songs done in whole new ways with harmonies. It’s a big circus and medicine show, as joyful a celebration as people can put on…. a great musical experience.”

It’s been a long road since August, an album of which he says, “I didn’t think anyone would get it, buy it, understand it, relate to it. I didn’t understand that being really personal is exactly what people related to.”

It’s something he has stayed true to, through all the records and all the “stories of how we slept with all the movie stars,” and all the way through the end of our interview.

The PR rep cuts in. It’s time for Adam Duritz to go back to being the man who everybody knows, but who knows no one.

“Its’ hard to learn to be open and be bare,” Duritz says, sounding a bit better. “Everyone tries to hide how they really feel. Then I realized the more exposed it was, the better it would be.”

Counting Crows play nTelos tomorrow night. Click here for tickets or more info.