Leadership topic - Counting Crows

Counting Crows began in 1991 as 2 people with acoustic guitars, Adam Duritz and David Bryson, playing the Bay Area. The name comes from a British nursery rhyme about counting magpies, one for sorrow. Duritz was born in Baltimore in 1964, the son of 2 physicians, and left UC Berkeley without finishing his English degree. He played in The Himalayans and in Sordid Humor and he waited a long time. In his own words, “I was 27 before anyone from any record company came to see any band I was in, and it wasn’t Counting Crows.” In January 1993 the band filled in for Van Morrison at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony. August and Everything After, produced by T Bone Burnett, came out on 14 September 1993.

Then it arrived all at once. Saturday Night Live in January 1994, an album climbing 40 spots a week for 5 or 6 weeks, number 4 on the Billboard 200, 7 times platinum, and a Rolling Stone cover that cost him the thing he had not thought to protect. “Your anonymity is f—ing gone.” He described the rest of it plainly years later on CBS: “And all of a sudden, I got mobbed. I was uncomfortable at the time. You know, it’s like waking up on Mars.” Before making Recovering the Satellites, which entered at number 1 in 1996, the singer on that cover went to work behind the bar at the Viper Room in West Hollywood and stayed for years. His reason was not humility. It was that everyone in the room was famous, so nobody was, and he needed somewhere to be ordinary. In 2008 he began talking publicly about the dissociative disorder he lives with, in his own words rather than anyone else’s, after keeping it private for a reason he stated without dressing it up: “I didn’t want to be a public spectacle.”

They are on leadingwithmusic.com because of what held. The band was built out of friends, and the friends stayed: Bryson is still in it 35 years on. Charlie Gillingham studied philosophy and artificial intelligence at Berkeley and worked as a software engineer in AI before he chose the Hammond B3 and the accordion instead. David Immerglück left John Hiatt’s band in 1999 to commit to this one. Matt Malley walked away in 2005 because the road was costing more than he wanted to pay as a new father, and said so out loud while the shows were still selling. Jim Bogios left a seat behind Sheryl Crow for the plainest reason on record, “becoming a band member and having more creative input.” Millard Powers filled in for 1 night in Denver in April 2005 and did the job well enough, often enough, that the seat became his. More than 20 million records, an Oscar nomination for Accidentally in Love, an HBO documentary in December 2025, and the line that matters most for a leader reading this: “You do always dream it lasts forever. It just doesn’t. But here we are.”