Counting Crows land at Centennial Terrace

Adam Duritz, left, and David Immergluck, right of The Counting Crows. GETTY IMAGES Enlarge

Alt-rock veterans the Counting Crows stop in Toledo by way of Centennial Terrace in Sylvania, for a Saturday night performance.

Tickets are available at the Stranahan Theater box office, 4645 Heatherdowns Blvd., at all TicketMaster outlets, at ticketmaster.com, and by phone at 800-745-3000. A limited number of VIP tickets are available for $71.50. Orchestra seats are $61.50 and general admission tickets are $39.50. Centennial Terrace is at 5773 Centennial Rd.

The band is touring in support of "Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did On Summer Vacation)," a covers album of 15 obscure and popular songs -- from Pure Prairie League's "Amie" to Big Star's "The Ballad of El Goodo" -- that is as much tribute as it is indicative of the group's wide-ranging Americana influences.

The Counting Crows broke big nearly two decades ago with their debut album "August and Everything After." The moody and subversively poppy record scored a major hit in the fall of 1993 with the infectious "Mr. Jones," and was a promise of bigger things to come, though the band has sporadically released studio records since.

An almost nervously chatty Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz fielded a wide range of questions during a media teleconference to promote the record and tour. Below are a few of his comments:

On how an album of cover songs organically sounds like the Counting Crows:

"I think that it probably sounds a lot like a Counting Crows album because when you make a record, songwriting isn't the main thing you do. … I come in with some skeletons of songs; it's just some chords and some words and that's a long way from what you guys listen to on a record. … Most of the work that goes into making a record is turning that sort of skeleton of chords of music into a song, into, in our case, a Counting Crows song, and that's something we all do together, and that takes most of the work, and that's really no different on this album than any Counting Crows album, because that's still what we did. The only difference is we didn't limit ourselves to one writer."

On releasing an independent record:

"We've always had creative control over our records … [so], in that sense, it didn't change anything at all. Where it did change was what we did afterwards and what we did during recording. Like, what we're able to do as far as giving downloads, doing the same with Bit Torrent, all the social media stuff."

On his psychological medication:

"It wasn't about breaking the dependency; it was just that I'd been on some medications for years that I think were probably really necessary to keep me safe at the time, because I was really losing it. But they were meds for people that were bipolar and I've never been diagnosed with bipolar.

"I think the reason they put me on them was because people who are bipolar need to be kept away from the highs and lows, so they keep you in a middle area, and I think with what was going on in my head, as scary as it was, those were just drugs to keep me safe and sane, but they weren't going to allow me to get better and they also made it very hard to be, like, creative because they affect cognitive stuff, so I was having huge memory problems, memory gaps, and the inability to remember things. ...

"I'm living now basically without anything for the most part, just Adderall, because the ADD is something, I think, that I do have and should be on that med, but other than that, I'm not on anything really, so it's a pretty raw life right now. It's very unprotected. But I don't find it particularly pleasant, but my friends and people tell me I seem much more clear these days than in the past and I'll buy that."

Contact Kirk Baird at kbaird@theblade.com or 419-724-6734.