Letter by Adam Duritz from Counting Crows on www.countingcrows.com

March 2009

Dear Fans,

Eighteen years ago, when Counting Crows signed our first record contract, we were an unknown band signed to DGC, the cool indie-flavored boutique label of Geffen Records. Our label mates were Sonic Youth, The Posies, Nirvana, The Sundays, Maria McKee and That Dog, to name a few. Bands knew each other, played on each other’s records, toured together… It was a dream environment to be a musician, even for that time.

A lot of things changed in seventeen years. DGC disappeared except as a logo on our records, and Geffen became one of many labels of a much larger conglomerate. Still, Geffen and Counting Crows never stopped working together and never stopped succeeding together. We made great music and together we sold a lot of records. We’re still here.

But these days, it’s a different world for a band than it is for a label. A lot of people think it’s a tough time to be a band but we don’t feel that way. The internet opens a world of limitless possibility, where the only boundaries are the boundaries of your own imagination. We want a chance to push those boundaries back as far as we can. Unfortunately, the directions we want to go and the opportunities we want to pursue are often things that our label is simply not allowed to do. We’ve been friends for a long time and we’ve worked together for a long time so they understand the direction we need to go in and we understand why they can’t always go there with us. We all want what’s best for everyone which is why we’ve decided to part ways.

Eighteen years ago, Counting Crows was just a little band from Berkeley. Geffen Records helped put us on the map and then they were our partner for almost two decades. We want to thank every person who worked hard for so many years to make us a successful band. We’re going to go out now and see what the world has to offer a band with a lot of ideas and a lot of energy and, hopefully, a lot of years left in a career that’s already surpassed our wildest dreams.

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. 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. From us to you, Live from The Royal Albert Hall in London, our tribute to Madonna: “Borderline”. Dig it.

We’ve covered a lot of road on this ride and, as far as we’re concerned, the busses still have a lot of white lines ahead of them.

We are on our way. We will see you soon. We are coming, as Elton said, “From the end of the world to your town.”

Counting Crows on amazon.com

Counting Crows on amazon.co.uk

Counting Crows Official Website
MySpace

Counting Crows were the first band in the O2 Wireless Festival’s 4-year history to perform in front of a sell-out crowd in London’s Hyde Park. Following this achievement, Live Nation is proud to present the band during their much awaited autumn tour of the UK.

Featuring special guests Ben Folds and Melee as support, this is a show not to be missed!

Under the banner “Counting Crows – Live from Hyde Park“, ticket buyers will be offered a link to download five free live tracks of Counting Crows’ spectacular live performance from their recent headlining appearance at their sell-out date at the O2 Wireless Festival in Hyde Park, London.

Live tracks include: “Have You Seen Me Lately,” “Colorblind” and “Anna Begins,” plus “Le Ballet d’Or” and “Hanging Tree,” from their latest studio album ‘Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings’.

Counting Crows 2008 UK tour dates:

Dates could be added or changed! Go to Counting Crows Official Website for the latest tour dates and information.

December 2 – Newcastle Arena
December 4 – Nottingham Arena
December 5 – London Wembly Arena
December 7 – Manchester Men Arena
December 8 – Cardiff International Arena
December 10 – Bournemouth BIC
December 11 – Brighton Centre
December 13 – Birmingham NEC Arena
December 14 – Sheffield Arena
December 18 – Glasgow SECC*

* Ben Folds will not appear as support for this date

Tickets will be on general sale at 9:00am Friday July 25, 2008.

Purchase by calling 0844 576 5483 or buy online at www.livenation.co.uk

All tickets subject to booking fee £33.50 Regional / £35 London

A Live Nation presentation by arrangement with ITB.

Counting Crows are a global phenomenon with a host of multiple platinum albums and Top 10 chart placings worldwide. Counting Crows have been a huge presence in the music world; from initial hit single “Mr. Jones” to 2005’s “Accidentally In Love” from the Shrek 2 soundtrack which saw the Californian band perform at the Academy Awards.

New album ‘Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings’ released in the UK on March 24th, saw the band split their musical personality with the rock Saturday Nights produced by Gil Norton (of Pixies and Foo Fighters fame) whilst the more acoustic Sunday Mornings portion sees Brian Deck (Modest Mouse, Iron and Wine) at the board.

For more information, go to:

Counting Crows Official Website
LiveCountingCrows.com

To celebrate the launch of Counting Crows summer tour, the band is calling all Counting Crows fans and artists to help create their summer tour poster!

One lucky winner will have their poster design printed and sold on tour.

Entrants will create and submit an original tour poster design that captures the sound and energy of Counting Crows. You must submit your entry by July 1st, 2008.

There are just three simple rules:

1) The poster must be 18″x24″ portrait or landscape.

2) Your artwork must be at least 300 DPI and be transmitted through the internet (Files must be jpeg or gif and must be less than 10MB in size).

3) Any graphic elements you use cannot be copyrighted.

Please send your entries to winner@countingcrows.com along with your name and, of course, your email address.

Happy designing!

Counting Crows 2008 tour dates:

Dates could be added or changed!

7/25 – Verizon Wireless Virginia Beach Amphitheater – Virginia Beach, VA*
7/26 – Toyota Pavilion at Montage Mountain – Scranton, PA*
7/28 – Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre Charlotte – Charlotte, NC*
7/29 – Time Warner Cable Music Pavilion at Walnut Creek – Raleigh, NC*
7/31 – Nikon at Jones Beach Theater – Wantagh, NY*
8/2 – Tweeter Center for the Performing Arts – Boston, MA*
8/5 – Hersheypark Stadium & Star Pavilion – Hershey, PA*
8/7 – PNC Bank Arts Center – Holmdel, NJ*
8/9 – Susquehanna Bank Center – Camden, NJ*
8/12 – Saratoga Performing Arts Center – Saratoga Springs, NY*
8/13 – Bethel Woods Center for The Arts – Bethel, NY*
8/15 – New England Dodge Music Center – Hartford, CT*
8/16 – Nissan Pavilion – Washington, DC*
8/18 – Darien Lake Performing Arts Center – Buffalo, NY*
8/19 – Molson Amphitheatre – Toronto, ON*
8/21 – Post-Gazette Pavilion – Pittsburgh, PA*
8/22 – First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre – Chicago, IL*
8/23 – Marcus Amphitheater – Milwaukee, WI*
8/28 – Verizon Wireless Music Center Indianapolis – Indianapolis, IN+
8/29 – DTE Energy Music Theatre – Detroit, MI+
8/30 – Riverbend Music Center – Cincinnati, OH+
9/5 – Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion – Houston, TX+
9/6 – Superpages.com Center – Dallas, TX+
9/9 – Journal Pavilion – Albuquerque, NM+
9/10 – Cricket Wireless Pavilion – Phoenix, AZ+
9/12 – Verizon Wireless Amphitheater – Irvine, CA+
9/13 – Coors Amphitheatre – San Diego, CA+
9/17 – Shoreline Amphitheatre at Mountain View – Mountain View, CA+
9/18 – Sleep Train Pavilion – Concord, CA+
9/20 – Amphitheater at Clark County – Ridgefield, WA+
9/21 – White River Amphitheatre – Seattle, WA+
9/24 – Coors Amphitheatre at Fiddler’s Green – Denver, CO+
9/26 – Starlight Theatre – Kansas City, MO+
9/27 – Verizon Wireless Amphitheater St. Louis – St. Louis, MO+
9/30 – Verizon Wireless Music Center Birmingham – Birmingham, AL+
10/1 – Lakewood Amphitheatre – Atlanta, GA+
10/3 – Ford Amphitheatre – Tampa, FL+
10/4 – Cruzan Amphitheatre – W. Palm Beach, FL+

* lineup includes Sara Bareilles
+lineup includes Augustana

For more information, go to:

Counting Crows Official Website

A note from Adam Duritz:

“So this was the thinking: people like to make their own videos nowadays. All you have to do is look at YouTube and you know it’s true. Sure, there are all the big expensive videos the bands make themselves, the ones MTV and VH1 play, but there are way way way more that people just make by themselves. There are millions of talented people out there and lots of them have cameras and computers so they make videos.

And that’s when it occurred to me…What was the one thing all those people making their own videos and setting them to our songs had no access to?

Footage. It was so simple. Pure raw footage of the band. That’s what all those people needed to really make cool videos. All they needed was footage…and we had a ton of it.

So welcome to the NEW Counting Crows Download Page. You can still come here and download the mp3’s of ‘1492′ and ‘When I Dream of Michelangelo’ but now you’re going to get something extra. Beginning today, you’re going to get raw footage of the band recording and playing the songs live. So you can do whatever you want with it. Make a video by just editing together the stuff we give you. Make up your own plot, act it out your self or with your friends and then insert the band footage into just like we do when we make OUR videos. Or just check it out and see what Immy looked like on a single take of a song. It’s up to you. It’s yours now.

When you’re done, whether you make it with your cell phone or with a professional camera, share it with us and everyone by uploading it to the Counting Crows Video YouTube Channel here:

Counting Crows MYOVideo
Counting Crows YouTube Channel
ACCOUNT NAME: countingcrowsmyov
PASSWORD: satsun1492

We’re going to try and give you different stuff every week or two for a while or until we run out of things we’re actually ‘allowed’ to give you but it all starts right here with 4 different feeds of studio footage from ‘1492.’

Here’s what you get:

1) Me
2) Immy tearing his guitar to shreds
3) Immy (he was pretty annoyingly everywhere on this song) pummeling his bass into pulp
4) Jim beating the living crap out of his drum kit.

So have fun. Enjoy. Make us something cool and then give it to us so we can show it to EVERYONE.

And stay tuned for the announcement in the next few weeks of what you’re getting next…because we GOT more so you’re going to GET more.”

-Adam Duritz, Counting Crows

(Read Adam’s full MYOVideo blog post)

MUSIC from Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings:

“You Can’t Count on Me” single

Download “1492″ MP3

Download “When I Dream of Michelangelo” MP3

‘SATURDAY NIGHTS & SUNDAY MORNINGS’ will be in stores March 25, 2008

Counting Crows: Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings on amazon.com

Counting Crows on Facebook
Counting Crows on Myspace
Counting Crows Official Website

Counting Crows have just released the first single from their highly-anticipated forthcoming album ‘Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings’: “You Can’t Count on Me”.

Listen to “You Can’t Count On Me”

Purchase “You Can’t Count On Me” MP3 on AMAZON.com

And if you haven’t heard them yet, check out these free downloads for “1492″ and “When I Dream of Michelangelo” also off ‘Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings’, in stores March 25, 2008.

Counting Crows: Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings on amazon.com

Stay tuned for the Counting Crows’ new download page on Counting Crows Official Website.

You can also visit the band on Counting Crows – MySpace and Facebook.

With over 20 million albums sold worldwide, eight Top 5 singles, and three records that have broken the Top 5 on the Billboard 200, Counting Crows are set to release an expanded deluxe version of their seminal album, ‘August and Everything After’ in the UK on January 28th, 2008 (Universal/Geffen).

‘August and Everything After’, the Counting Crows first album released in 1994, showcased the band as a chart-topping powerhouse. Once MTV aired the video to their top 5 track “Mr. Jones,” the album jumped 40 spots on the Billboard Top 200 in one week.

In addition to the original songs on ‘August and Everything After’, the deluxe version will include previously unreleased demos plus the entire final show from the August Tour in 1994 from Elysee Montmartre in Paris, France. Also included are liner notes written by lead singer/songwriter, Adam Duritz.

Still going strong today, most recently, their single “Accidentally In Love” from the Shrek 2 soundtrack earned them an Oscar™, Grammy, and Golden Globe nomination, and reached the #1 position on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Following up the deluxe version of ‘August and Everything After’, the Counting Crows will release their long awaited new album ‘Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings’ within weeks. The record is the Crows’ first studio album in almost 5 years, since the release of ‘Hard Candy’ in 2002.

Counting Crows: August and Everything After [Extra Tracks] [Deluxe Edition] on amazon.co.uk

For more information about the Counting Crows, please visit:

Counting Crows on Myspace
Counting Crows Official Website

On March 25, 2008, Counting Crows will release their fifth studio album (and their first in five years), ‘Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings’, on Geffen/Interscope.

‘Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings’ is just your average brilliant, unsparing rock & roll song cycle about the high life and the low life, about sin and whatever the hell follows. This is an album with two distinct yet deeply related halves:

‘Saturday Nights’ – the album’s angry, electric, dissolute opening salvo – was produced by Gil Norton (The Pixies, Foo Fighters). The more acoustic and folk-influenced ‘Sunday Mornings’ was produced by Brian Deck whose past credits include Modest Mouse and Iron & Wine.

Free Counting Crows downloads:

“1492″ MP3
“When I Dream Of Michelangelo” MP3
from ‘Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings’

For Adam Duritz, ‘Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings’ is “about dissolution and disintegration. It’s about when Saturday night happens and you lose all sense of yourself. And it’s about when you wake up Sunday morning and look back at the wreck you’ve made of your life and you think, ‘How can I possibly fix this? How can I ever climb out of this hole?’ And then you start to try and climb.”

Duritz says of the inspiration for the title, “When I finally realized what this record was about and that it was actually going to be two different records that fit together as one, the title popped into my head immediately. It’s a title that’s been used before in slightly different forms more than once, but none of them were the inspiration for my title. That came from a late night stop at a truck stop somewhere in Georgia while we were touring August and Everything After.

“One day I grabbed this bizarre looking double-cassette by Ralph Stanley called Saturday Night & Sunday Morning. After that, you had to fight me to get it out of the stereo. It’s just an unreal record about sin and redemption with inspired song choices and unearthly performances from Stanley himself and a sea of guests.

“These days, everybody wants to tell you how different every genre of music is and how one kind is good and another isn’t. But on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, country and bluegrass find a way to effortless prove that it’s all really just music. Our album may not have much redemption in the end but we got all the sin I could live with and at least an attempt to try for something better.”

Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings on amazon.com

Counting Crows on Myspace
Counting Crows Official Website