As the Crow flies

That American organic/folk rock/ a bit rootsy/a bit retro thing sure is a strange one; on one side of the compilation album you can swing and swoon to The Byrds, early REM (before they became a self-important bunch of tossers, basically), the mighty T-Bone Burnett, bits of The Band and the very under-rated Grant Lee Buffalo. On the other side there's the binaural horror show of Hootie and the Blowfish and any number of agitated young songwriters on MTV shrieking about empowerment and trying to pass off their doggerel as poetry. Not today, thanks.

Having consulted the oracle, I suppose "American Trad Rock" (that's without the side order of alt.county, cheers) is a better sweeping generalisation than most, especially when it comes to Counting Crows. A consistently good band, who have never quite attracted feverish levels of attention, they're more a Mojo than a Q band - if you dig the circulation demographic - a quality act who easily-peasily transcend their Van Morrison/ The Band influences and origins.

With no pyrotechnical stage show, heavily rotated hit singles or patently contrived Vanity Fair-type storyline to push them into people's faces, Adam Duritz and his fellow Californians have proceeded on their characteristically melancholic way over the course of three albums and have retained a strong fan base among people who care more about the song than the video. Yup, they do exactly what they say on the tin.

Once the white heat of grunge had abated, they rather reluctantly moved centre stage with their debut, August and Everything After, which sold a staggering seven million copies (staggering given the genre they represent). A beautifully down-tempo and Buffalo Springfieldesque collection, the only up-tempo song on the album, Mr Jones yielded the lone hit single. The sophomore effort, Recovering The Satellites shuck off the fairweather fans, something that main man Adam Duritz is perversely proud of. "When we broke, it was just after grunge, and maybe people, in the US at least, were looking for a new band to invest in and we did get a huge reaction to the first album," he says. "But something about that whole scene left us very uncomfortable. There were areas about all of that success that scared the shit out of me. Hit records are so much predicated on sounding like whatever's out there already - and I don't think we do."

So was the downbeat second album and the equally downbeat new one, This Desert Life, a sort of tactical move, or just too many Nick Drake references coming to the fore? "Man, I just love Nick Drake. He was certainly a huge influence on me when I first started writing songs. I think though it was more to do with playing songs well as opposed to be being a great player, if you know what I mean." Not really, no. "Well, it's a sort of emotional vocabulary and therefore unwritten. It's a case of realising that the band have been playing for a while, but having to forget everything we've learnt about how one plays and learn how to play songs - to get the emotion of a song over more than how it is executed. All I can do is go out and sing emotional songs."

So by extension, you're saying that hitech isn't where it's at? "In a sense, yes. We make very organic music, we even use accordions and mandolins and you could call us `rootsy'. But then look at what Mercury Rev and The Flaming Lips are doing - they, too, show that the quality of the song, as opposed to the technology behind it, can shine through."

Not that there's any big techno-backlash going on with Counting Crows, just that they are proud of their retro roots and also proud that while they can appeal to the "adult alternative" crowd, they can also hack it with younger fans who are alienated by so much dance/trance aural wall paper. They're what Paul Weller could have been.

This Desert Life is on the Interscope label. Counting Crows play the Green Energy Festival in Galway on June 4th, Green Energy, Cork on June 5th and the Point Depot, Dublin on June 14th.