Trivia / Counting Crows

• Artist Disillusionment: Recovering the Satellites has this as a theme, with "Have You Seen Me Lately?" and "Monkey" being particularly good examples. The Across a Wire version of "Mr. Jones" also has strong elements of this.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: "Accidentally in Love". "Big Yellow Taxi" plays with this; early copies of Hard Candy contained the song (sans Vanessa Carlton) as a hidden track for months before Two Weeks Notice came out.
• Creator Breakdown: "Have You Seen Me Lately", and subsequent performances of "Mr. Jones". Duritz's best work seems to come from traumatic and/or depressing events.
  • Part of the reason for the six-year gap between Hard Candy and Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings was that Duritz was, at points, too depressed to leave his house.
  • Duritz has revealed that he has suffered from depersonalisation-derealisation disorder. With that in mind, the band's many Sanity Slippage Songs become even more poignant.
• Disowned Adaptation: Their cover of "Big Yellow Taxi" has earned a lot of critical derision. A scathing review of it by The Village Voice, which names it the worst song of the 2000s, is archived and displayed on Joni Mitchell's website in a potential sign of her disapproval of the cover.
• Fake Nationality: Adam Duritz is an American Jew with Russian ancestry, who has olive skin and wears dreadlocks, and has often been confused for being black or Caribbean because of his complexion and hairstyle. Lampshaded in the song 1492, where he introduces himself by saying "I'm a Russian-Jew-American impersonating African-Jamaican".
• Rarely Performed Song: A case with the original version of "Mr. Jones". The song, from their debut album, is about struggling musicians seeking fame and hit #2 on the US Billboard chart. Starting around 1997, following years of vocalist/songwriter Adam Duritz enduring mental health struggles and disillusionment with fame, the band began performing a more "subdued" acoustic version of the song live. Additionally, several of the lyrics were changed. "We all wanna be big, big stars, but we got different reasons for that" became "We all wanna be big, big stars, but then we get second thoughts about that"; while "when everybody loves you, sometimes that's just about as funky as you can be" became "when everybody loves you, sometimes that's just about as fucked up as you can be." Thus, the original version of the song is now rarely performed.
• What Could Have Been: "1492" was originally going to be on Hard Candy. but Duritz was not satisfied with the final result. It would later end up as the first track on Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings.
• Write What You Know: Many of their songs deal with mental health issues. Duritz himself has suffered from some, as mentioned above under Creator Breakdown.