Q&A: Counting crows frontman adam duritz

They're real! In that they're not imaginary. They're extensions.

Isn't that cheating? Why not grow real dreads?

You know, I did try. They made my hair itch. And man, they smelled.

But you had plenty of time to cultivate real dreads. After all, you took six years off between your last two albums.

I was losing my mind from touring. I have dissociative mental disorder -- it makes the world seem like it's not really there. You need familiar surroundings: family, friends, girlfriends. They ground you. When you're on tour all the time, it's hard to maintain those things. The tours were bringing me down. I hit rock bottom.

So what brought you back from the brink?

I was really losing my mind. The word 'hospital' was being used. So I wrote a song about it called 1492 and that was the start of our latest album, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings. And during the recording, I started to turn some parts of my life around. I wouldn't say I got healthy -- at least I stopped going down and tried to go up. It was hard -- it's easier to fall than to climb.

Speaking of life-changing events, you recently split from Geffen Records, to whom Counting Crows had been signed for 16 years. That must have been a wrench.

It was amicable. They're good people. The problem is they're in a corporate structure that won't allow them to be creative. I have full creative freedom -- I can make any album I want, artistically. They don't have that. As marketing and promotions people they are limited as what the company will let them do. I wanted to give music away for free. But a lot of big companies won't allow that.

But wasn't there a rumour that the label rejected Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, feeling it was too dark?

There's this idea out there that people turn in albums to record companies and they are refused on the basis they aren't good enough. Maybe that happens, but they don't do it to us. The fact is our records sell a lot -- a new Counting Crows album, that's one million sales minimum.

The first song you gave away for free was a cover of Madonna's Borderline. On the recording, you note that Madonna borrowed an album title of yours, Hard Candy. Is there a feud brewing?

She came up with Hard Candy on her own and then at a meeting someone said 'you do realise, that was the name of the last Counting Crows record?' She was kinda bummed out, apparently, and wasn't going to use it. Then she went back and used it anyway. When I introduced the song, I was taking the piss out of Madonna a little bit. I thanked her for dedicating the whole of her new album to us.

And then, last Christmas, you cancelled your European tour, on the rather bizarre premise that global exchange rates were in flux.

We were selling plenty of tickets. It had nothing to do with buying tickets -- it had everything to do with whether your currency is going to be worth everything or nothing from one week to the next. I didn't want to bankrupt ourselves.

You've been quoted as describing fame as a burden. But you dated both Courteney Cox and Jennifer Aniston when they were starring in Friends. Sounds like someone wants to have their cake and eat it.

Nah, there's no downside. There are lot of perks. But essentially it's a hollow thing. What's the first thing our parents teach us? That money and popularity are not the be-all-and- end-all. I knew that when I was six.

Counting Crows play Odyssey Belfast May 7, O2 Dublin May 8. Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings is out now.