UPDATED: Sept. 5 at 11:19 p.m.

Chances are you’ve heard “Mr. Jones” or “Big Yellow Taxi” at Target or your local grocery store. Chances are you’ve seen “Shrek 2” and loved the song that plays in the background of the Fiona and Shrek love montage.

There’s also a pretty high chance that you know absolutely nothing about the band that penned those bangers. The band is Counting Crows, and the group will be performing Saturday at the Lakeview Amphitheater with Matchbox Twenty. Here are five things you need to know about this band that no one under 30 knows anything about.

It’s a big live band

Counting “Across a Wire (Live in New York)” as a double LP because it has two disks, the band has released five live albums and six original studio albums, which is a lot of live albums compared to how many studio albums exist. When playing live, the band makes a new set list for each show. Vocalist Adam Duritz frequently ad-libs lyrics, often extending live versions of Counting Crows hits well past their studio versions. The live version of “Round Here” on “August and Everything After – Live at Town Hall” is just under 12 minutes long.

It does a lot of covers

“Big Yellow Taxi” is a cover of Joni Mitchell’s original version from the 1960s. It has covered Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil” and Bob Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country.” It even made an album with only covers, called “Underwater Sunshine (or what we did on our summer vacation).”

Bonus: Check out this super low-quality, deep-track cover of “Cecilia” by Simon & Garfunkel.

Adam Duritz uses Tinder

A few years have passed since “Mr. Jones” came out in 1993. The internet became a thing and so did Tinder. A few years have passed since Duritz was 26, and sometime a few years ago, Duritz decided to swipe right.

There is a piece of Maria in every song that Duritz sings

That’s a lyrical reference to “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby,” one of the leading tracks off 1999’s “This Desert Life.”

But Maria is actually a recurring character in many Counting Crows’ songs. She even appears in songs by The Himalayans, which is the band Duritz was a part of before Counting Crows. The most famous reference to Maria is in “Mr. Jones,” where Duritz sings “show me some of them Spanish dances.” Even though some fans are convinced that Maria is a real person, Duritz contends that she is a fictional semirepresentation of himself.

The band’s name comes from a creepy nursery rhyme

Not exactly. But when Duritz and longtime friend and Crows guitarist David Bryson used to play coffeehouses in San Francisco, he heard the nursery rhyme “One for Sorrow” in a movie one of his close friends starred in. The rhyme is about an English superstition that groups of magpies — a bird in the crow family – can help predict the future, but seeing just a single crow is bad luck. The rhyme reads: “one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told” and it’s referenced in the band’s song “A Murder of One.”

Published on September 5, 2017 at 10:30 pm

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