Counting Crows are the latest in a legion of bands to depart from their records labels in search of greener pastures. After an 18 year relationship, the band that first rose to fame in 1993 with “Mr. Jones” and “Round Here,” perhaps the most depressing radio hit of all time, is moving on.
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Counting Crows are the latest in a legion of bands to depart from their records labels in search of greener pastures. After an 18 year relationship, the band that first rose to fame in 1993 with “Mr. Jones” and “Round Here,” perhaps the most depressing radio hit of all time, is moving on.
Frontman Adam Duritz discussed the split in an exclusive interview with Entertainment Weekly:
“The internet’s changed everything. But the record companies aren’t owned by the David Geffens anymore. They aren’t owned by guys who might be visionary in this sort of way. It’s not the fault of the record companies. There’s plenty of smart people there. But, at a certain point, they’re owned by a guy who just works at a large large corporation. And his job is to see the bottom line. And when someone comes to him and says, we’d like to give something away free-I imagine that’s something his superiors don’t want him to say. The people we worked with at Geffen are smart and understood completely what we were doing. When we finally got cleared to do some things for this last record [2008’s Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings] they couldn’t have jumped in with more enthusiasm. But the fact is, it doesn’t matter whether you are artist-friendly or not, there are rules about proprietary uses of music, and those rules come from on high and you are just not allow to do things. You could see it in their eyes, too-there was a certain helplessness there.”
On their website, the band delve further into the reasons behind the split, and offer a free download of their version of Madonna’s “Over The Borderline” to tide fans over until their next project.
“This is a big change for us but it’s a border we’ve been wanting to cross for a long time so we want to celebrate it,” Duritz writes. “The best way to do that seems to be to give a little something to all of you since, after all, you’ve been with us the whole time too. So, in the spirit of this new frontier we’re entering, we offer you our homage to a certain lady who honored us last year by expressing her longtime deep and abiding worship of our band by naming her entire album after one of ours [Hard Candy]. From us to you, Live from The Royal Albert Hall in London, our tribute to Madonna: “Borderline.” Dig it.”
