Putting on Duritz

OBLIQUE ANGELS
The first [half of] this record is about frustration and fury and bitterness, and being so taut with this sort of frustration and confusion. The second is a little more about the catharsis and learning a little bit going from "Have You Seen Me Lately" to "Miller's Angels." The guy in "Miller's Angels" is trying to take a minute and think about what scares him so much. I'm thinking about what scares me so much in "Miller's Angels." The song's about the concept of what if there is a God and what if there are angels? What if they're not necessarily benevolent or benign at all? What if they're ambivalent? They are these things that hang between you and the light of God something's blocking it. And they just pluck you when they do, and if you can't stop thinking about that, then you spend your whole life waiting for that.

In the earlier parts of the album the guy's also howling at the fact of needing to wait for faith, God, or a woman, and why they hang him on a fence and make him wait for it. By "Miller's Angels," instead of being angry about it, he's just saying, "God, why don't you just leave me alone?" And not necessarily feeling better. He doesn't feel any better there than he does in "Angels Of The Silences" or "Catapult," but he's just crying about it as opposed to howling or wanting to throw himself off a cliff.

THE CENTRAL FOCUS
The songs are all about me. And I tend to write in such a way that I invest in myself in the songs and in the other characters too, because I think that one of my problems in life is playing to pull the strings of people. I don't trust life enough to come to me on its own. So it's now in my songs. I actually write more songs than I have dreams, but I tend to be invested in things both ways. I think that a lot of the problem with me is that I tend to worry about whether I actually exist or not. I see life as a series of ghosts, you know what I mean. Your memories are what you are. They're what make you into something different, and to accumulate them and have them add up to something is what life is all about. I've had them sort of line up behind me. They're back there. They're not part of me, and they don't add up to anything. So you can end up being a very old child because your life does not accumulate and does not add up to anything. And that was really kind of horrifying to think about. It takes a lot of faith to go to sleep at night, in a way. What are you really doing? I don't want to give you nightmares, but what you're doing is you're saying, "OK, take my mind and do whatever you're going to do with it." I have trouble dealing with that. You're trapped in your sleep. You're going to be there and it's going to eat you. Whatever is going to eat you is going to sit down and play with you all night long. I'm not really wild about that. I think I've looked for love to be the kind of thing where you're not pulling the strings in the dream, and therefore you know you exist and someone cares about you. Part of the second half of the album is recognizing that loss is not total, that you can still remember and cherish things, and they can add up to something in your life even if they're gone.

THE LONG HAUL OF FAME
I wouldn't trade [the fame], but I was a fucked-up person. I have a career now, and I'm successful at it. It didn't fix that. I don't want to say that I'm ungrateful for it, because it was a one-in-a-million miracle thing that happened to me. To get from where I was in a little room to here is astounding. At the same time, it doesn't fix the problems that you had. It fixes some of them. It exacerbates some of them.

At night I still have flashbacks all the time. I'm still a wreck emotionally in my life I tend to get really overwhelmed by things, but I seem to come through them. Well, I tend to be drowning at times, though. I feel like it's really close at times especially that last year on the road. I had no life. And I was terrified of everyone. It's easy here [in L.A.]. There's no problem here, and there's nobody who cares here. Or if they do, it's nice.

[On the road] I can't go anywhere. I can't see people. Also, you become an object instead of a person. I'm a person here. I was an object out there. And I object to it because you [become] so angry. The more they see you as an object, the more you become one. I wasn't the most stable person in the beginning anyway, but it just

[After the first album and its attendant touring] I did some other stuff. I bartended. I didn't like playing music any more. I didn't see that it was making my life good. It made me a lot of money, but writing's what gets you into the trouble. The fact that you can do that makes you go there and do the other stuff. And I realized what I was doing, too. I was taking my life and using it as fodder for a career, and I had no life, and I had a career. And every time I had someone I loved, I had songs. They're all the same kind of songs, too. It's a post-mourning song about something.

DO IT CLEAN
I think you're defined by your fears and how you handle them. Bravery is not not being scared. Bravery is what you do when you are scared. I think of myself as a very fragile person, a very needy person, a very weak person. At the same time, I'm the strongest person I know. And I do it through all that. We're clean. We're so clean. We never hype the records. We never let them push us in a weird way. We never even release any singles in America. We did it all on the road, and we made two videos. We played only two TV shows and Letterman. We wanted on those shows. We didn't run around playing "Mr. Jones" five million times. We went our own way. We always have. We made our own record our way. No one told us what to do. We picked our own producers. We picked our own songs. We were there for the mix. We did it again this time.

WORKING AGAINST THE MAN
I think there's always a certain rewriting of history after a band has had some success. I doubt you'll find a band — even the alternative bands you may admire — who actually did it more their own way than we did. All those bands capitulated, whether it's doing magazines that have no business having articles about them, whether it's being an alternative band and being in People or Details or any of those. Or else copping to the label on what single they want, or what director they want, or what kind of shows you play — what you're going to do to get your fame. You'll never find any other band that did less of that than us. I think we got a lot of hype later on for being a hyped band from Geffen, from being a corporate band, and it's so ridiculous, because nobody has ever done it more on their own. No one's ever faced down the Man to the extent that we have and won every time.

TOO FAST TOO SOON?
I think Michael [Stipe]'s got a real luxury. They've carte blanche to do whatever they want from now on. Critically and credibility-wise, it doesn't matter what they do. Also, they came up slowly, so they were alternative forever, and so they're still alternative. They can do whatever they want and everyone will go, "Well, it's R.E.M., and it's fine." They're not going to always make good albums, but they're not going to get whacked critically. And they have a certain sainthood now that's evolved.

We don't have that protection at all. We had certainly planned to do the R.E.M. thing. We really tried. You notice we didn't do much on the last album. We cut it off after two videos. All we were going to do was tour for a year. When it got out of hand, I stopped everything except for the touring. I wanted it to be real.

And we had so much [success] the first time that it insults people, because they know great bands that didn't make it. I do too. I have friends who are great and didn't make it. To me, though, the six million records? Don't blame me. It has nothing to do with me. What we did was make the record. I'm proud of that. Six million — I don't care. I'm happy about the money, but I don't get artistic or too much personal satisfaction from that. I need to do something to exist … something important. I needed to leave the farm. I was determined to do that. And I needed to leave a mark.

STAGECRAFT
I told myself that first time I went up on stage, I'm not going to worry about it. I'm just going to do what I'm going to be like. So when I was awkward and clumsy, I didn't worry about that because I knew the secret to the whole thing was the honesty of it. If I want to pull my jacket off and hold it around me, I don't think that's an affectation; I think it's a security blanket. You know, I couldn't go on stage without that suede fringed jacket for a while, because it was a security blanket. And there's nothing wrong with having a security blanket, and I'll stick it in my ass if I want to.

I'm doing whatever I feel like doing, and if I like doing it, I'll do it. And it's totally not fake. I don't know Joe Cocker. I've almost never even seen what Joe Cocker does. I have vague memories of the Woodstock thing. But I'll bet he did [his eccentric gesticulations] because he wanted to be a spazz and because it felt right to sing that way doing that.

Now I think I feel a little more beautiful up there, and maybe it comes through more that way. And also I'm not so clumsy up there. I jumped up on monitor stands before. I still almost fall off every time, but I must just look a little better doing it.

CHANGING PRODUCERS
I don't really think it's a risk [to change producers]. Especially when you're a young band, you have so much to learn about how to make records. You know this much, and then T-Bone [Burnett] comes along and teaches you all this. So you've got all that now. You don't need all that. Now you need all this. You need not even the next step, but just different. R.E.M. works with Scott [Litt] exclusively now, but they didn't originally. They went through a great deal Don Gehman, Mitch Easter, Don Dixon, Joe Boyd. You're talking about from Let's Active to Fairport Convention to John Mellencamp.

You need to learn about different aspects of yourself. I had no desire to do a repetition of the first album. Not that I don't love the first album, but I knew that these songs weren't anything like that. We didn't set out to make this kind of album. We just played and became a different band and wrote songs, and these are the songs. That said, having realized what kind of an album the songs were, I had to be very careful about not pouring these songs into a crucible of the old album's ideals. I had to make sure to be true to where these wanted to go, and I needed to find somebody who really understood them. People didn't want to produce this album. Or if they did, they wanted it so different from what we wanted it. I talked to a lot of people. People would listen to it and say, "That 'Daylight Fading' is pretty good, but you've gotta drop 'Catapult.'" "Catapult" was the benchmark of the whole record for all of us. And sonically it's the one that was the big breakthrough for all of us on how to play the album. The combination of the melodies and the different kinds of instruments, from the flutes of the mellotron, and the melodies inherent in that, to the distortion and interweaving of the guitars. All the different sonic qualities of that to the real yearning of the vocal that is this album in a nutshell, and the combination of textures we were heading for.

CHOOSING GIL NORTON
Gil is probably one of the two or three most influential producers of the last 10 or 15 years. He doesn't get the credit for that. But Nirvana changed music, and Kurt was really clear about how much he listened to those Pixies records. And Gil did those records. He was able to focus the band into something where you could hear those songs. Doolittle floors me to this day. Listen to "Debaser" it's a stunning song. "Monkey Gone To Heaven" is out of this world.

Gil had never called back. So I thought he didn't even bother to make an excuse. One day the phone rang and he said, "I've got the tape and I've been listening to it a lot. I'm doing a lot of other records, so I had to take my time. I wanted to make sure I got my thoughts together." And then he proceeded to talk to me about every song and every guy in the band. And for every song, he knew the best things about it, he understood it lyrically and emotionally, and he knew what it needed to fix it. And for every guy in the band, he knew what he loved about their playing, and he knew the limitations of their playing, and he had some ideas of how to fix it. I'd never even met him before, and it was done for me at that point. He was the guy. Period.

DRIVING THE BAND
I have to drive, but I have to give them enough room to breathe … and yet not too much. What you don't want to do is be gone for a whole day and have them work all day and come in and say, "That doesn't work." Because they start to lose confidence that they know where to go because they put such an effort into something, and it becomes wasted.

I push them really hard. And they need it. We needed some things to change on this album. I do not want to be a member of Adam & The Heartbreakers. Nothing against Tom and the band, but he made a choice to be Tom Petty and not just be the Heartbreakers.

I want to be in a band. And I told Dan [Vickrey] and Charlie [Gillingham] I need someone, preferably both of you, but I need someone to be Keith Richards. You can no longer dick around on your solos. [There has] to be every bit as much of a reason for you to be playing as there is for me to be singing. And then I ground them into the ground really hard.

It's so important for our band in the long term that we are a band. When you play in local bands, it's all democratic, everybody's lazy. No one pushes each other. It's all like, "Oh, we'll play it a little better, but it's not really life or death." Well, I expect enormous amounts of myself, and you had damn well better produce yourself. And if you don't you'll find me up your ass anyway, and then you will produce it.

We all get along really well. There was a certain point in our band where I had to pull back from our friendship with some of them. I get the responsibility and blame for a lot of shit in our band that's going on. I want them to be great.

It's a fine line. People say you should all be fun. But I don't agree. I don't care about fun. Not in music. It's not fun. I don't enjoy it. I feel it, though. It moves me. I have a deep satisfaction and it moves me deeply. Fuck fun. Go have fun somewhere else. I don't do it for that. I do it so that I can be who I am in my life. But fun fun later. And we'll have fun sometimes during. But mainly right now, I want your soul and I want it on tape. And they do it.

You can pour the water on them and you can push them into the ground in a certain place. You can try to be the sun, but they are going to have to bloom on their own. You can't actually make anyone do anything in an art form. Especially a collaborative one. But you've got to get them to bloom. And they have to decide to bloom on their own. And these guys all did.

POETRY & EMOTION
(Holds up Carolyn Forch‚'s The Country Between Us) This book, for a long time, has been probably the most influential thing on my writing as a songwriter.

She's a phenomenal poet. I read that in a poetry class my freshman fall term at Davis, before I went to Berkeley. I saw her speak, and I was so blown away by her and by the book in general. She has a way of turning a phrase at the end of a poem and it's almost like a punch line. It's not funny though. And it's a thing I learned from her in my writing. There's a real humanity in the writing.

She's very young. This was written in 1981. She didn't write another book after this until about two years ago. She wrote one called The Angel Of History. And I love it. (Opens book, turns to poem) The first third of this book is about her experiences in El Salvador. She lived down there for a while and she wrote a lot of poems, but they're somewhat political. The second section is about her childhood, and the third section is just one long poem. This one is called "Because One Is Always Forgotten." (Reads poem.) Just the ending sums it all up by dropping this line very nonchalantly on you, like a bomb: "The heart is the toughest part of the body / The tenderness is in the hands." But we do our damage with our hands, you know.

A SALTY DOG
My parents always complained that no one knows what to get me, which I think is so stupid, because my entire house is made up of records, books, and videos. And so on the one hand you may give me something I already have, but I love these things so much that it should be obvious what to get me.

(Displays first edition of Patrick O'Brien's Master And Commander) I've read everything by him, just about. It's an incredible series of books. I read all of them, and then I started over on the first one again, which that is. I had so much fun with them. I read all the Hornblower books at one point. Those were so much fun. I heard these were way better, and they are. They're not as much easy fun, but they're better.

It's like one long novel. I've read a lot of books and series where the guy gets tired. I used to really love to read science fiction when I was a kid. And I read all those Edgar Rice Burroughs books. And any of the series are good at the beginning and then [decline] towards the end. These don't. They just developed. They're phenomenal books.

The last one that just came out last year is as good as any of the other ones. As soon as I was done with it, I read Master And Commander again. And I considered reading them [all] again at that point.

SOUL PATROL
I really loved [Peter] Guralnick. I've only read two of his books; I'm almost done with Last Train To Memphis, which is great. But Sweet Soul Music is such a phenomenal book. Books about music should do one thing: They should make you want to go out and buy music. I know so much about soul music, because I have all the records, because I read that book and I went out and got everything. Man, I know so much about Memphis soul.

The other one that's really great . I read the Jerry Wexler book first. And I met him. The day I finished the book, I gave it to my dad, and Bonnie [Simmons, longtime Bay Area radio star] called me and said, "Do you want to go to dinner with someone tonight?" I'm like, "Who?" She's like, "There's this guy I've known since I was a kid, and I'm like his daughter." "Oh, who is it?" "He's a producer. Maybe you've heard of him. Jerry Wexler." I'm like, "I'm coming."

I talked to him that night and he told stories and it was like a Pagemaster thing. He walked right out of that book, and it was exact ... he told me some of the same stories, and some other ones. It was so cool.

BELLOW FELLOW
I really love Henderson The Rain King; the book was a talisman for me. The song ["Rain King," from August And Everything] has little or nothing to do with the book. But the book became a totem for me for being a writer. It's about this guy who's just a big open wound of a person. And it was very much the way I thought ... the way he lived his life, for better and for worse; he just bled all over everyone. He made a big mess of everything and also did beautiful things. But his life was how I thought you should be as an artist. You need to let your life flow out, for better or for worse, and pour out all over everyone. And it was enormously important to me.

There's some William Styron books I really love. Pat Conroy's books are all great. I started with The Water Is Wide because one of my favorite movies as a kid was Conrack. That's the book of Conrack, which is his autobiographical one. And then I read The Lords Of Discipline and The Prince Of Tides, which I think was a phenomenal book. And then I just read Beach Music — phenomenal book. The only one I haven't read is The Great Santini.

I read all these books. I like buying them at a faster pace than I can read them. Walter Mosley. That character [Easy Rawlins] was so interesting to me. I loved Isabel Allende off and on, in that I read the first book of Love Shadows. And then I read The House Of Spirits and I thought, "That's a miraculous book."

(Holds up a volume from Shelby Foote's Civil War histories) These are the best books I've ever read. I read the whole series on the road while in the back of the tour bus. He's such a good writer, and those books are like a narrative history. It's like reading The Lord Of The Rings. You know how you lived in that for a long time, and when it was finally over you were almost sorry? That's what it's like, only it's longer. It's 3,000 pages long. They're a great companion piece to that series [Ken Burns' Civil War].

There's a lot of information about being an American in those things. They make their way into your music, because you can actually read those books and then you stand in front of the Lincoln Monument and you read the Gettysburg Address. And the Gettysburg Address will make you cry.

MYTH AMERICA
I believe in the myth of America. I'm fascinated by the myth of America. Not the political aspects of it. We can all talk about that forever, because we are all disappointed in our nation's [politics]. But America is Henderson. America is a vast, messy, beautiful, glorious thing with complexities — highs and lows other countries can only dream of at this point in history. So glorious in its intention. And we raise up our Christs like every culture does.

Look, the world is really a trashy place. You will never convince me of anything else. People are horrible. They always have been and they always will be. It's not worse or better nowadays. There's no New Age Utopia going on. We're not more enlightened than we were. We're not less enlightened than we were. It's always been mob rule. There's great things that have happened in our history, but we've almost always nailed them up to a cross somewhere. The great examples of humanity are people that were outside humanity, and rarities of humanity. They get hung up to dry. And we love a good martyr afterwards, to make us feel good about ourselves. Then we take him and make him belong to us, but he was never ours. And we kill him and we take his stuff. That's how we do it. It's the way humans are. You can go all the way back to the Egyptians enslaving the Jews. You can go back as far as you want to go. And it's always been the same.

THE NAME GAME
[Counting Crows] is named after a nursery rhyme. I call it a divination rhyme. It's just a nursery rhyme — one for sorrow, two for joy. It's from this movie Signs Of Life, which was originally called One For Sorrow, Two For Joy. I had already seen the movie, and I was watching it for the second time on video when it came out months later. I happened to be trying to find a name for the band, and I had this list of names-terrible names, horrible names. There was a scene where Vincent D'Onofrio and Kevin G. O'Connor are standing on this hillside, and they're trying to figure out what the hell they're going to do with the rest of their lives. A flock of crows flies up and D'Onofrio says, "What was the nursery rhyme your grandmother used to tell us about counting crows?" O'Connor said, "No, I think it's counting dogs." "No, I think it's counting crows." That's the scene. That's where it's from.

THE SPORTING LIFE
What I do with sports is I believe deeply. I'm absorbed by it. I'm completely enthralled with excellence with anyone. I don't see any difference between what I do and what Mark McGwire does. You're not born with that. You hone it. You make it at a certain level. Plenty of people were born with what I was born with. I got it to where it is now. I got it to a higher level [through] sheer force of will in a lot of senses.

ACTING OUT
I don't want to act any more. I used to. I can't see the point in it. I've seen my friends make movies. It's not that much fun. I was a good actor, I think. I think, actually, I'd probably be pretty good at it, but the thing is I'm not going to be that good at it. I think, "OK, what's the fun?" The fun isn't actually doing the movie. The fun is seeing yourself in the movie, and knowing that you're in the movie, and other people are seeing the movie. Well, I don't need that. It'd be like playing little moments of the song, or recording songs by only doing tiny little bits of them at a time.

JUST FRIENDS
All my best friends are actresses. My three best friends in the world are Mary Louise Parker, Joanna Going, and Samantha Mathis. I try to date independent women. It's hard for me if the other person doesn't have a life. There's a real independence in being an artist, not just that they have their own career, which is really important.

My relationship with Jennifer Aniston, which is a big nothing, [has been misconstrued], but I wouldn't call that a great misconception about me. I did date those people. I can't deny that. I wanted to, and I did, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

I don't know what those [tabloid] TV shows did before Friends came along. Because when I went out with Jennifer ... it's not what ruined our relationship at all, but it was horrible. I have never experienced anything so vile in my life. There were people chasing me around with their cameras. Going to say goodnight to her outside the Viper Room, and they're closer to me than you are with their camera in my face while I'm sitting with her. "You guys get away from me." "Why, what are you going to do? Got a problem? Go ahead."

Some of them don't [egg you on] but a lot of them do. It's because your video tape is worth five bucks or it's worth 10,000 bucks. You get someone to hit you, you get someone to make a scene, you're worth 10,000 bucks.

THOUGHT FOR FOOD
My band jokes that I live to travel the world and eat the weirdest possible shit. I just think food's great, and I don't care if it's weird, because somebody somewhere thinks it's a delicacy, so I want that experience too. So if you're serving monkey brains, OK. I'm not going to cut them out of some monkey's head while it's alive. But if somebody somewhere who's perfectly intelligent and has a culture that's 3,000 years older than mine thinks monkey brains are good, I'm not going to be the one who doesn't try it. I've had it all.

The best meal I've ever had was in Paris. When we'd go to Europe we'd have cooks traveling with us because you can't depend on the food there. And we'd get different food from different places. We always have a vegetable, a fish, or a meat. In Paris I asked what's the meat and they said, "Cheval." Now I speak French, so just try pulling that one by me. Bring it on. And it was so amazing. I think of red meats, and horse is right in the middle. It was more flavorful than beef without being quite as gamy as venison, and it was more interesting texturally than beef without being quite as stringy as venison can be. They had it in this port reduction sauce, and it was just phenomenal.