I vividly remember my first encounter with Counting Crows, though I can't remember the exact date. I recall it was sometime around my 24th birthday in late September 1993. I think I might have just seen the clip for "Mr. Jones" or "Round Here" on MTV the day before. I was bowled over by the album that spawned them, but the chronology of how I came to be aware of the Bay Area boys tends to blur.
I do know that the group's debut, "August and Everything After," had just arrived, ushered in on waves of critical hype proclaiming the quintet the next Band and dreadlocked vocalist Adam Duritz a throwback to primo Van Morrison - a welcome development at a time when rock had been overrun by grunge both great and godawful.

A little bit country and a little bit rock'n'roll is how Counting Crows guitarist Dan Vickrey describes the band's upcoming fifth studio release to Billboard.com. No release date has been penciled in yet for the follow-up to 2002's "Hard Candy."
"The idea at the moment is to have kind of a rocking side and then an acoustic-y, maybe country-ish side," Vickrey says. "We got the first half done in May in New York, so half of it is pretty strong and done. And now we're going to work on the second half, the country tunes, during the tour."

Counting Crows' last studio CD was 2002's "Hard Candy." The band hasn't been on tour since early 2003 and has basically been on sabbatical ever since then.
And "Hard Candy," for that matter, wasn't a blockbuster hit. It peaked at No. 5 on the "Billboard" album chart two weeks after its release and its big single was a cover of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi," which reached No. 5 on "Billboard" magazine's Adult Contemporary chart.