How we wrote ‘Mr. Jones’ by Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz

Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz: “We didn’t know Mr Jones was a hit… The record company didn’t even want it as a single”

The Californian alt-rock band’s frontman recalls a wild evening, creative clashes and a lucky break that created a career-defining anthem

In 2019, Counting Crows returned with what was their first new music in seven years, Butter Miracle Suite One, and this year they’re set to follow up with Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets! In doing so, the alt-rock icons re-introduce many of the elements that helped us fall in love with the band from Berkeley, California in the first place… There’s Adam Duritz’s rich and passionate voice and the narrative songwriting, packed with intriguing vignettes of people and places, which never meanders too far from the classic musicianship at the heart of Counting Crows.

Those ingredients, plus a whole lot of melody, have been familiar to fans ever since their debut album August And Everything After dropped in 1993. More than three decades later, the now seven-times Platinum long player is packed with fan favourites like Round Here, Rain King, Omaha and Anna Begins. But it was the lead single, Mr. Jones, that became the band’s first radio hit and catapulted them into the mainstream, charting in many countries and reaching No 1 in Canada.

We had the pleasure of hearing from Mr Duritz exactly how the career-defining anthem came to be…

First published in Songwriting Magazine Spring 2025

Released: 1 December 1993
Artist: Counting Crows
Label: Geffen
Songwriter: David Bryson, Adam Duritz
Producers: T-Bone Burnett
UK Chart Position: 28
US Chart Position: –

“It was really late at night… Mr Jones, Marty Jones’ dad, left when he was a kid and moved to Spain. And he’s probably one of the only Americans ever to have a successful career as a flamenco guitar player in Spain – he recorded as David Serva in Madrid. He came back and visited while we were in a band together. I can’t remember if it was Counting Crows, as he joined [previous band] The Himalayans later, so it might have been then. And we went to see him play in [San Francisco district] the Mission with his own flamenco troupe. Afterwards, he went out drinking with the whole flamenco crowd and, at one point, we were in this bar called The New Amsterdam. In the corner at this little booth was Kenny Dale Johnson, who was Chris Isaac’s drummer and they were the hottest rockabilly band. He’s got two or three girls at the table and he just looks like a rock star. So Marty and I were like, ‘We got to get our shit together. We can’t even talk to girls. And yet, he’s over there with three!’ So later that night, I went home and wrote the song – I was wasted, too. So I don’t really remember much about writing it, but I think I recorded a demo. We had a little four-track, one of those cassette ones, I just recorded a version of it that night and it was still there the next day. I mean, it’s the story of that night, but it’s also the story of how I had this dream about being a rock and roll star. But I also knew that those dreams don’t come true and make the whole world the perfect place you want it to be, there’s so much more to life than that. So I knew that and the song was about the dream, but also about how the guy’s wrong. When everybody loves you, you keep saying, ‘I will never be lonely,’ but that’s not how it works – you were meant to see through him. But you’re also meant to see that it’s a great dream. It’s not going to be everything he wants it to be, but it’s still great.

“I always liked not having one-dimensional thoughts. It’s not just a celebration of rock and roll; it’s also the hollowness of having your dreams come true. I’m very proud that the song has so many levels to it. I will always really love it for that. It’s just such a great piece of writing, but I don’t remember much else about writing it except for that. I remember the night very vividly, leading up to getting home. And I remember, sort of, sitting down with this idea of the song and thinking about it. But I don’t really remember anything else about it, because it was the middle of the night.

Counting Crows

“I can’t play guitar at all, really. But I write for guitar – it’s almost always guitar in my head. I have these rudimentary ways of playing it, then I teach it to the guys so I don’t have to worry about it anymore.

“I brought [Mr. Jones] into a couple of the different bands we were in and they just didn’t get the feel, and even Counting Crows really struggled with the feel for Mr. Jones at first – we had a lot of trouble playing it. It was a big trouble recording it. It’s not [founding member and drummer] Steve Bowman playing on that song because he hated it. He kept saying it’s music he didn’t sign up for. Like, what are you talking about? It’s not a country song. He heard it wrong, too. It was a big problem… I was having a lot of trouble getting anyone else to hear it… We finally got the feel, but I was writing these songs that were a real struggle for other people to understand what I was doing.

“Even when the record was done, we didn’t know Mr. Jones was a hit. The record company didn’t even want it as a single, they wanted Murder Of One because it had that Jesus Jones drum beat, but it was too long. So I suggested Mr. Jones. I thought it was a good introductory single, maybe it would get us to Round Here, which I thought was a really cool song. But we agreed to disagree and released nothing! We went on the road with no single, nothing going on. But people liked the [album] and they were playing like 10 different songs off the record on the radio in America. We were opening for the first tour – it was us, The Cranberries and then Suede – and we did some shows with Midnight Oil. So when there was a lot of radio at all those gigs, we would just lie to the radio guys and say, ‘Oh, the single is Mr. Jones.’ Actually, the story that I hear – although it doesn’t sound very realistic to me for it to be true – is that MTV called up Geffen and said, ‘Where’s the video for the Counting Crows single?’ and the person at Geffen said, ‘What is it?’ And they’re like, ‘Mr. Jones. How do you not know your own song?’ And then they said, ‘Okay, just kidding,’ and then made the video in a rush that Thanksgiving, because we’re out on tour and we’ve never made a video because we didn’t have a single. I don’t know how true that story is, but we had to fly in, in a rush, over a weekend on tour and make the video very quickly. I picked out a director that I really liked who had done a bunch of commercials and this one video, but I saw it and I was like we should use that guy, he’s really creative and good.

“When we made the video at Thanksgiving, we decided… No one releases videos between Christmas and New Year’s because there was no charts that week. So even if you do well, no one notices. But my managers are like, ‘We should release it this week because even though there’s no charts, they might play it a lot because there’s nothing else.’ And so we gave it to MTV that week. It did really well on like, 120 Minutes and all the alternative shows. Then, about two weeks later, we started another tour and we played Saturday Night Live, we played Round Here and Mr. Jones at the end of the show, at like 1:30 in the morning. The show ran…and the [album], which was not even in the Top 200, jumped 40 spots a week for five weeks… And then we’re at No 2 for a year-and-a-half to two years.”

Counting Crows’ album Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets! is out now. Find out more at countingcrows.com

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