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When Counting Crows frontman and principal songwriter Adam Duritz decides to hang up the mic for the last time, he’ll likely be remembered with a list of musical achievements: Over 20 million albums sold worldwide; an Academy Award nomination for “Accidentally In Love”; an arena-packing live presence. With those accomplishments in mind, it might seem easy to overlook the tooth-and-nail struggles that Duritz endured along the way.

But Duritz has indeed faced some hardships. He has been diagnosed with a chronic dissociative disorder that has manifested itself over the last several years, including the peak of his fame during the mid-to-late 90s. “With dissociative disorder, the world doesn’t seem real,” he tells me in our recent phone conversation.

Despite his ailments, Duritz continues to do what he loves most; his zest for recording, arranging, and performing hasn’t dampened. His latest output with Counting Crows, a covers album titled Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did On Our Summer Vacation), sidesteps the pitfalls of most records of it’s kind – it’s rich with passion instead of pastiche.

Duritz is currently touring the U.S. with his band. He spoke to Stereo IQ with an open, composed maturity of one who has been accustomed to all facets of life as a struggling yet successful musician and human. Read on as Duritz explains the simple responsibilities of writing a song compared to the complex nature of recording one, the allure and the reality of fame, the challenge of suffering a mental illness, and his takes on the meanings of “Mr. Jones” and “Round Here”.

Stereo IQ: It seems like doing covers album would be an arduous project because you’re pressured to match the quality of the original artist. Do you find the experience more challenging than composing an album of songs you wrote yourself?

Adam Duritz: No, it’s just different. You have the same pressure when you write an original song: you have to match the quality of the song, and you have to come up with an arrangement as good as the song. When I write songs for a record, it’s just chords and words. They’re just real skeletons, you know? As a band you turn them into a song, and that’s the same thing you have to do with one of these (covers). You have to owe it the same dedication.

I mean, you’re absolutely right about the pressure, but I mean, pressure is not necessarily a negative — I think that it’s sort of been taken in our society as one. But don’t you want that (pressure) all the time, anyway? You want the quality of your whatever work you do to be really high, so I think you always want to put pressure on yourself so that you can perform at a high level.

Stereo IQ: Are there any songs that you find too unimpeachable to cover?

Adam Duritz: Some songs are really well done the way they are, and they just don’t need it (to be covered). That Big Star song “The Ballad Of El Goodo” that’s on the end of our record, that’s one of my favorite songs ever and has got a place in my heart. I was fine doing it. I don’t know that I would do his song “Thirteen”. There’s something perfect about that version.

Stereo IQ: Have you heard Elliott Smith’s cover of “Thirteen”? His version is beautiful.

Adam Duritz: No, I haven’t. See, part of it is just finding the way in. Now, see, Elliott is a perfect person to be covering that song. And he plays a lot like Alex (Chilton) does on that song. Elliott’s albums are generally more stripped-down. You know, finding a way into it is the main justification for covering a song. If you have a way to make it your own, that’s the only reason you’ll ever need. You don’t just want to make a karaoke record. [laughs]

Stereo IQ: Your work writing songs for films, most notably “Accidently In Love” for Shrek 2, has distinguished you as an artist. Do you always strive to write songs with cinematic elements in mind?

Adam Duritz: Well, that song was specifically written for the movie. I think that lyrically, I’m very detailed. And I think I get a lot of sense of place so that can be kind of a visual thing. So in that sense, it’s sort of cinematic. Even that song, “Accidentally In Love”— the writing process wasn’t about being cinematic; it was about finding a very real story and trying to write about something in my life that worked for that moment in the film.

People have different skills as writers and they use different techniques. For me, I’m very much about details. I believe that I can list the things that are on the shelves of your room, and that’s going to tell the listener more about how you feel than just saying how you feel. You know, it’s better to paint a picture than it is to say something out loud sometimes, because a lot of that has become very shorthand in our culture nowadays. It’s like that line in “A Long December”: “All at once you look across a crowded room to see the way a light attaches to a girl.” I think that’s a better way of expressing that feeling than “I saw her and I kind of fell in love with her.”

Stereo IQ: You’ve spoken on several occasions about suffering from a dissociative disorder, and how it changes your perception of the world. But do you find any silver lining to this disease? Does it allow you to become more creative?

Adam Duritz: I don’t think there are any positives with mental illness. I don’t think it makes you more creative. I think it just makes your life hell. I don’t think you need to be fucked up to write. I think it just gets in the way of everything.

Stereo IQ: Do you find that your mood affects the quality of songs you write? Will you write more compelling songs when you’re in a fit of anxiety, or are you more focused when you’re calm?

Adam Duritz: I think people turn to writing when they’re in certain moods because they can’t do anything else; I don’t think you need to be in that mood to write. And a mood is not the same thing as a disorder. Being depressed or in a bad mood is not the same as suffering from depression. With dissociative disorder, the world doesn’t seem real. It’s fucking terrifying. It’s nothing I would ever wish on anyone and I wish I didn’t have to deal with it myself. I’d love to not be like that.

Stereo IQ: Have your fans come up to you in support? Do they see you as brave because you’re still able to make music despite living with this issue?

Adam Duritz: I don’t know. I don’t think it’s brave, since there’s no choice in the matter. I mean, this is my life and I got sucked into this. It’s just a terrible thing. It’s not a bravery thing. I just thought that this (disease) would clear up, and all these years have gone by and I haven’t been able to.

Stereo IQ: In one of your band’s biggest hits, “Mr. Jones”, you sing: “We all wanna be big big stars, but we got different reasons for that” and “When everybody loves me, I will never be lonely.” But a few years after that song came out, you would recant those sentiments. For example, during your live album Across The Wire you changed the former lyric to the following: “We all wanna be big, big stars, but then we get second thoughts about that.” What prompted you to change your mind?

Adam Duritz: I didn’t. You were supposed to see through that at the time. I mean, I don’t think people did. [laughs] But the guy’s not right, that’s the thing. Popularity and money and everything, it doesn’t work that way. “When everybody loves me, I’ll never be lonely” – he’s just wrong. And it’s not going to change anything.

Stereo IQ: Seems like you chose to be more forthcoming about the true meaning to “Mr. Jones” when you played it live.

I mean, I thought people would see through it at the time. You’re writing from a character’s point of view and you’re trying to show people behind the eyes. People don’t always say exactly what they think. They say things and you’re supposed to see (what they meant) behind them, but it didn’t always work.

I remember one of the reasons we started playing an acoustic version of that song was because I wanted to give people a different look into it, a different direction. And that led us to play acoustic versions of lots of songs. “Mr. Jones” was probably the first one we did, but I’m not sure about that.

Once you play a song acoustically, you come though in a different way. I did, anyway. A lot of songs I wrote were about more than one thing. They’re kind of complicated. “Mr. Jones” is not only about wanting to be a big star; it’s about all the reasons we get people to dream and the reasons we dream those things. And how some of them are going to turn out and how some of them aren’t going to turn out. Which is no reason not to dream, anyway.

It’s also about dreaming about being a big rock and roll star, which seemed really cool at the time. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The fact that it doesn’t turn out to be everything you want, well, that’s just life. Life doesn’t turn out to be what you think it’s going to be. Nothing is what you dream it’ll be.

Stereo IQ: So “Mr. Jones” is about disillusionment with fame?

Adam Duritz: No, no, no. It’s about trying to be famous, which is a perfectly fine thing to do. It’s just not going to turn out the way you dreamed it. It’s not a disillusionment thing; it’s just real. When you dream about going on a first date with a really pretty girl and you’re imagining what’s it’s going to be like, well, it’s not going to be like the dream of her because she’s a real person. She’s not your imaginary date. That’s not a bad thing; it’s just not the dream.

Thinking that when everyone loves me, I’ll never be lonely – that’s not going to work out either. Doesn’t mean that you’re always going to be lonely, it just means that fame isn’t related to everyone loving you. Truth is, fame is what it is. And I knew that before I was famous which is why I wrote that song. I knew that we wanted to be big stars so that we could go talk to these girls, but I also knew that that’s not going to fix your life. That’s just common sense. I wrote that song long before, four or five years before it came out.

Long before I was famous I knew that being famous wasn’t going to fix everything. That’s not disillusionment; it’s just understanding what fame is: a popularity contest you run against people you don’t know. It doesn’t change you; it doesn’t change things for the better. It just changes the way people react to you. People will love you and people will hate you. And hate is a weird thing (to receive) from people who don’t know you. And being loved is a weird thing from people who don’t know you. Because guess what? Being loved by people you don’t know is not the same as being loved. That’s a whole different thing. Cause you’re just being loved in people’s imaginations. It’s not really the same thing as when someone really knows you. Dreaming about that girl isn’t the same as being with that girl.

Hey, fame is great for getting dinner reservations. It’s great for getting concert tickets. And it’s great for having a career in rock and roll. But it will not make you happy. I know people for whom it’s a really big deal being famous. For me, it’s an interesting deal.

Stereo IQ: Are you comfortable with fame?

Adam Duritz: Sometimes. I was always a shy person, you know? And I’d say I’ve adjusted to my shyness in ways I never really expected to. It wasn’t the same as that first year when it was like waking up on Mars all of a sudden. I hadn’t changed at all, but everybody else went crazy, as far as I can tell. But, you know, that was 20 years ago. You do get used to the gravity. It just takes a little while.

Stereo IQ: You’ve been actively engaged in social media to connect with fans, most notably Twitter. You even professed that Twitter changed your life. What do you think other artists should do to reach out to their fans better?

Adam Duritz: It’s simple, really. It is social media. There’s a reason that part of the Internet blew up. Social media blew up because it’s actually social and people are social animals. The mistake people make when they try to use it for business is that it can suddenly not be social. The mistake you make is when you treat social media like it is only business, but it’s not; it’s really social media. And so you have to put yourself into it.

I’m not sure if Justin Bieber’s Twitter works because it has 20 million people following him, or whether it’s because he’s just really, really famous. As far as using it effectively – which is different than having a lot of followers – you have to treat it like a social thing. You have to involve yourself, your real self. You have to be yourself, talk about things that interest you. It’s not like a vending machine; you can’t just pop stuff in the slot and out pops promotion in equal measure. It doesn’t work that way.

People may follow famous people but they don’t do what they say. I think that they tend to respond to retweets by people they actually know more than just people they follow. Also at this point people are following so many people that there’s no way they’re just following them all day long. But they’re much more likely to see a retweet from a friend. But the hope is that putting yourself in socially, people will retweet you. I don’t think I’ve mastered it yet, I can say that I have one and a half million people (following you) and saying something doesn’t get one and a half million people to do it. It just doesn’t.

Stereo IQ: Regarding the meaning to “Round Here”, you told VH1 Storytellers “The song begins with a guy walking out the front door of his house, and leaving behind this woman. But the more he begins to leave people behind in his life, the more he feels like he’s leaving himself behind as well.” Can you elaborate on that?

Adam Duritz: To me, “Round Here” is really about trying to find a way out of childhood and into adulthood. And this is a guy who’s trying to declare his independence. I don’t think it’s about leaving behind a girl at all. But it’s about a guy who’s trying to declare his independence and all he ends up doing are the kinds of things people tell you to do when you’re a kid. “Round here we always stand up straight. Round here nobody make us wait. Round here we stay up very, very late.” They’re all stories about how adults tell kids how to be adults.

So this guy is trying to find his way in the world out of childhood and adulthood, and all he really knows about being an adult is the lessons he was told as a child. And they don’t necessarily mean anything, so that doesn’t work for him. It’s not really about leaving a girl behind at all; it’s kind of about going out into the world and leaving your childhood behind, or trying to. That’s what that song’s about.