Counting Crows: September 15, 2021: Moody Ampitheater

I think there is a lesson I should learn about going back to try to relive your past.  It's just never going to be as good as you want it to be.

25+ years ago, I loved Counting Crows.  Like, I had August and Everything After and Recovering the Satellites just burned into my brain.  Each of those two albums reminds me of important milestones in life - my first real girlfriend, a trip to Boulder with my sister, a lacrosse tournament in San Francisco, hours spent driving around town in high school.  Love those two discs.  And their later music was fine - This Desert Life and Hard Candy had good tunes that I dug after college was over.  And, I knew the wife liked them as well, so a win/win to snag tickets for this show.

As an aside, the new Moody Amphitheater downtown looks freaking awesome.  The entrance was kind of a hassle right now because of construction across the street, but the setup and space is really freaking nice.  We had lawn seats and just posted up on the grass to enjoy the show with good sight lines.

The issue here is that Adam Duritz just kind of went off on his own little deal and refused to really stick to the songs.  Now, don't get mad at me, I don't expect a band to do exact replicas of their songs for a concert.  I'm down with some ad libs and changing things up to make it fresh and interesting.  But he straight up just changed the songs and the lyrics and the notes he was supposed to hit.  Like, "Mr. Jones" is half sung in a falsetto because it's supposed to be so high?  Well Adam just kept it down in a baritone and did his thing.  Which leaves the crowd - mainly old people who dug these songs in 1994 - all over the place when trying to sing along.  From talking to others, this is apparently a known thing, that Duritz doesn't seem to try to emulate his recorded songs.  A quick google reflects this as well.

Which is too bad!  The band sounded good, and it was fun to hear them play some of my favorite tunes, but not being able to sing along is lame, and it's also just hard to get into a tune that you know and love when the reasons for it being amazing in the first place are removed.

I'm glad I went, but was definitely bummed by the performance.