It’s been 25 years since Adam Duritz and his Counting Crows band mates released their brilliant debut album, August And Everything After. In the quarter century since then, the Bay Area band have sold over 20 million records and toured the world over probably hundreds of times.

Through all of that time, Counting Crows have remained a beloved live draw, buoyed by a wealth of masterful songs, from early hits such as “Mr. Jones” and “Round Here” to the sublime epic “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” and the rocking “A Murder Of One.”

As the band gets ready to hit the road, with special guests Live, to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary I spoke with Duritz for the second edition of my new Who I Am column. Just like the first one with Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson (https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebaltin/2018/05/29/who-i-am-shirley-manson-on-how-abba-blade-runner-and-more-made-her-a-rock-icon/#3f69d084e290) Duritz walks us through the works of art and moments, from his love of hip hop and Japanese films to what it means to be an American and his thoughts on immigration in this insightful and revealing conversation.

Rothko Chapel, Houston (Age 9, 19)

It’s this non-denominational chapel where all the walls are Mark Rothko paintings. I was in college and when we were studying Rothko I was just having such a powerful reaction to all of it. I felt like I do about a lot of music I love. It just seemed to have this sob in it that was so moving to me and it also seemed really familiar to me in a lot of ways. Then I remembered when I was about nine years old, we were living in Texas, I went to the Rothko Chapel to see it for a school trip or something. And it made this huge impression on me when I was nine years old and it’s funny it came back to me 10 years later in college. I was just starting to write songs and become a musician and the memory of this chapel and his painting made a huge impression on me. I find his paintings to be this huge well of emotion.

Kagemusha, Age 17

I grew up in the Bay Area and there’s a lot of international culture and also a big eating culture. My friends and I did a lot of getting drunk and cooking. My friend Joey and I would cook five-course dinners that would go all night. But one time, just the two of us, we’d been reading and hearing a lot about Japanese movies. This was ‘81, before sushi is really something that anybody really gets anywhere, it was nothing we knew about. But we went down to the Chinese markets, which are these unmarked buildings in Downtown Oakland. We went there and got tuna, salmon and octopus and we had a book on making sushi. We got completely wasted, made all this sushi and watched Akira Kurosawa’s movie, Kagemusha. It inspired me to even more of a love of cooking, but also Japanese culture and food and specifically Kurosawa, because after seeing that movie I had to see everything. There were a million rep movies in the Bay Area, they would always bring around the Kurosawa movies and I would go watch them every time. I still think, to this day, The Seven Samurai is the best movie ever made. Big Star, Age 18

I went on this trip to England and Scotland with my parents when I was 18 and everywhere we went I found the record stores and I found Richard Thompson records, Richard and Linda Thompson, Fairport Convention, the Modern Lovers, Billy Bragg, but maybe the most important of all them was I had been reading about Big Star for ages. I found all the Big Star records when I was in England and those records changed my life. That’s still probably the most influential band to me. It’s not just me, Big Star might have been the most important band for all the music that came out in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The guys in R.E.M. were obsessed with that; the Replacements wrote a song called “Alex Chilton.” I really trace it, I went on that trip to Europe and I got #1 Record and Radio City and Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers, and I also picked up a bunch of Alex’s solo stuff. But those three records changed my life. They were one of the two most influential things on me as a songwriter.

Carolyn Forche, The Country Between Us ,Age 19

She’s a poet and I started to write songs after that summer, my freshman year in college. I remember getting R.E.M.’s Chronic Town, reading this book fall term of my freshman year and writing my first song all at the same time. It’s both about her childhood in Michigan and growing away from that and a bunch of time she spent in El Salvador. Her writing probably influenced me lyrically more than anything else. Every time I go back and pick up that book I see so much of the way I write in the way she writes, which I don’t even think I realized it for years. I read a lot of her poetry after that, there’s a way she writes that is so similar to the way I write that it’s hard to not credit her as being the mother of my writing in a lot of ways.

The Statue Of Liberty, Age 21

Around the age of 21, I saw Ken Burns’ documentary The State Of Liberty on PBS. It started a real life-long love of his work for me. The first half is about building the Statue Of Liberty and it’s really interesting and well told. And the second half is talking to a lot of New Yorkers and people, immigrants especially, in present day and what Statue Of Liberty means to them and what America means to them as immigrants. It’s funny, we live in such a jangositic time right now where we’re so anti-immigration, but the truth is immigrants appreciate America more than a lot of Americans because it really is the dream for them. We are an immigrant country. I think it’s a cool statue, but it can’t possibly mean for me what it meant for my great-grandparents, who came here from Russia and the Ukraine, or somebody coming across the border nowadays. The essence of life, in some ways, is possibility, what my life could be and America sums that up more than anything else because America says you could be anything.

Sunday In The Park With George, Age 24

PBS filmed Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday In The Park With George and I watched it out in Berkeley where I lived. It blew my mind, just the complexity of his writing, the way he switches from rigorous, almost classicist moments to beautiful , heartbreaking, sweeping romantic music almost like Puccini. But a very modern, complicated Puccini. But also it’s really a meditation on art; what it is to be an artist and the things that drive us to create and the place that art fills in our society, the role that it plays for the artist themselves and the people who witness it. It raises a lot of questions about what it is to be someone who’s driven to create, which is of course big for me because that’s an essential drive of my life. Run-DMC, Raising Hell, Age 24

I’ve always conflated and intertwined R.E.M. and Run-DMC. And they’re both really important to me. Hip-hop was there when I was younger and I liked it. But the first time I heard Run-DMC I was blown away by the interweaving of the two voices; the doubling each other’s words here and there and jumping in and out of phrases, finishing phrases for each other, how tightly interwoven it was, like the way a Dixieland band plays or a great rock and roll or jazz band does. They were doing it with the rap and that really blew my mind. I was getting more and more obsessed with R.E.M. at the same time and how that band was that way. The vocals were almost impressionistic, some of them seemed to be nonsense words, just worked at that moment. They communicated things emotionally even if they weren’t actually saying a real word. All I can say is I’m 24 and Run-DMC and R.E.M. pretty much are doing the same thing I can’t tell you what it is in a really interesting way.

De La Soul, 3 Feet High And Rising, Age 25

De La Soul and Paul’s Boutique, by Beastie Boys, are maybe the two greatest sampling records ever, the most creative use of samples. I don’t mean taking Rick James and making “Can’t Touch This” out of it. I mean each song has 12 different samples and they’re just incredibly creative musically in terms of sampling. Those records, especially 3 Feet High And Rising, the use of sampling on that record is so creative and so musical as a composition the work they’re doing is so incredible and it’ll never happen again because you can’t sample like that anymore. I was working as a landscaper and earning money towards Europe and I’d be by myself for days just doing stuff and that record was all I listened to over and over again.

Felipe Molina, Nino Talentoso, Age 31

It’s actually the painting on the cover of Somewhere Under Wonderland. It’s the first time I’ve really had money in my life, of my own. We made a bunch of money that year, I’m visiting New York and walking around the Village. I walk into this one gallery and there are a bunch of photos and some paintings by Ron Wood and a bunch of paintings by Felipe Molina and I just stood there for hours, I feel like, looking at these paintings. They were so beautiful and they spoke to me so much. Somebody came up to me and asked if I was interested in buying the painting. It never occurred to me I could buy a painting. I asked how much it was and it suddenly occurred to me I could buy a painting. I bought a few paintings that day and for years the only thing I ever spent any money on was books and later DVDs. I bought a bunch of Felipe’s art. That was huge for me because I realized wherever I live, that’s what I want around me. I want books and CDs and art. I don’t need cars really. I did eventually buy a house. But the things I really love in this world were those kind of things. And it all started with staring at that painting of that little boy with the thought cloud above his head full of stars.

Sean Barna, Cissy, Age 53

The last one is just this year. I put on these shows called the “Outlaw Roadshow,” with my friend Ryan Spaulding for the last seven or eight years in Austin, Nashville, Toronto and here in New York. We split off this year and we’re doing a new festival called “Underwater Sunshine.” Being a part of that has allowed me to meet a lot of musicians over the last five to 10 years. When you start out you have a group of friend who play music, you’re all playing in the clubs together. In San Francisco it was really like that and I think that was one of the quickest things I really lost as soon as I was famous because it’s different. Unless you want to go hang out at the Grammys or MTV or that kind of social life, which is not really me, you lose that group of peers. The nice thing about the “Outlaw Roadshow,” in a lot of those ways, is I was suddenly surrounded by musicians again. One of the guys who played is this guy Sean Barna, This year he made a record that floored me. Musically and lyrically it was like something out of Mott The Hoople or Lou Reed. It was just this world of questioning the meaning of sexuality, the life we all lead as musicians, as straight people, as gay people, it’s just incredible.