With "Black Sun," his stage musical collaboration with playwright Stephen Belber, currently on hold, Adam Duritz has put a new Counting Crows album into motion -- the group's first of original material since 2008's "Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings."
"It took me awhile to shift back to writing for Counting Crows, in that vein, but now I'm there," Duritz tells Billboard. "We've got about four or five pieces of music; we haven't finished any of them yet, but there are four or five songs I've been working on. We've been playing them with the band in sound checks on the last tour, down in Australia. We had a little time to work on them and the band really liked them. I just have to finish writing them now and get some more (songs) going and then get us back in the studio."
That will likely happen in late July or August, after Counting Crows finishes a run of summer shows that includes a tour with the Wallflowers. Duritz says the group might preview some of the new songs during those concerts "if I get them finished to the point where they're ready for that. If something's ready to play in a gig we've never had any hesitation doing that." And he predicts there will be a marked influence from making last year's covers set "Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did On Our Summer Vacation)."