Counting Crows to swoop into Sylvania

On “Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did on Our Summer Vacation),” Counting Crows refract 15 tracks, bending a few favorite songs to create big, bright waves of sound.

Adam Duritz said the group had fun covering songs — and found freedom.

“It was such a great liberating thing to get to work with so many other songwriters, in a way. I mean, it was like collaborating with people without them being there,” he said during a teleconference with some 30 media outlets, including Toledo Free Press.

“Something happened when we made that record. I mean, we just played differently and I’m not sure why, but it affected everybody,” he said. “There was something that was completely liberating about not doing my songs, about just like the fact that the guy that wrote them wasn’t necessarily standing in the room with you and wasn’t necessarily a guy you’d known for all these years, so you owed less to them, in a way.

“I don’t know what happened with everybody, but everybody loosened up in some way. It was really creative, including [for] me. Like, I love the singing on this record; I love the vocals on this record.”

And he loves listening to the disc, which features songs by Pure Prairie League, Tender Mercies, Fairport Convention, Travis, Bob Dylan, Teenage Fanclub, Faces, Gram Parsons, Big Star and others.

“I feel like putting it on sometimes, walking around the city listening to it. I dig it. It just keeps surprising me,” Duritz said.

The singer-songwriter and the band — drummer Jim Bogios, keyboardist Charlie Gillingham, bassist Millard Powers, and guitarists David Bryson, David Immerglück and Dan Vickrey — are hitting the road in support of their first independent release, which came out in April.

“We were looking for just not playing the sort of same old cookie-cutter venues that everybody goes to. We wanted venues that were a little bit more fun to play and also maybe a little more fun for an audience because we want people to be coming out early and checking out all these bands,” he said.

Counting Crows will bring the Outlaw Road Show to Centennial Terrace in Sylvania for a 7 p.m. concert June 16, 2012. Special guests will be Good Old War, Foreign Fields and Filligar. Tickets range from $35 to $85. Gates open at 5:30 p.m.

The front man with the famous dreads said the group likes to wing it and writes the set list right before the show.

That list might not feature all the rockers’ hits, which include “Mr. Jones,” “Rain King,” “Hangin’ Around,” “Accidentally in Love,” “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Round Here.”

“If I’m tired of playing something, I’m not going to play it because I think that’s going to make a bad show,” Duritz said.

“You don’t owe [fans] songs, but you do owe them a quality performance, and I think the best way to do that is to, like, make sure that you’re fully invested in everything you’re doing. And it’s art, so you can’t necessarily guarantee you’re going to be fully invested in somebody else’s suggestions, but you can pretty much guarantee you’ll be invested in yours.

“And I think we’ve stuck by that fairly religiously over the years, and I think it’s really paid off for us because I still like playing ‘Mr. Jones’ as opposed to a lot of people I know who have that kind of song in their catalog who just don’t want to play [it].”