Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz, featuring a shorter hair style sans dreadlocks, wrote the four new songs on the bandsá "Butter Miracle, Suite One" EP while vacationing in England. (Submitted photo / Mark Seliger)

Nonrock fans may know only two things about Counting Crows.

First is the song “Mr. Jones,” which was everywhere in 1994 and took the band from being a college radio act to “the biggest band in the world for a minute,” as lead singer Adam Duritz described it in a phone interview last week.

The second thing is — that’s the band with the guy with the hair.

While their size shifted and swelled over the years, Duritz’s dreads attracted as much attention as his lyrics. He was recognizable, even to those who couldn’t name a second song.

But in addition to writing the tracks that make up the band’s new EP “Butter Miracle, Suite One,” Duritz did something else on his 2019 vacation to England — he shaved his head.

Now sporting a shorter, stylish ‘do, he has no regrets about cutting his hair or keeping the dreads as long as he did.

Duritz has been open about his mental health and being a person with a dissociative disorder, and he talked about how he didn’t relate to the person he saw growing up.

“I’d look at mirrors and feel, ‘That’s not me,'” he said. “That was true my whole life, before I knew what was happening. One thing about the dreads, when I had the dreads, I remember looking at myself at one point and thinking, ‘Yeah, that feels right.’ For the first time in my life, the guy I saw in the mirror was what I felt like.

“That was a huge change in my life, and it felt really good for me for a long time. When you’re like that, it’s amazing to find something that makes you feel you’re not dissociative, even the simple act of looking in the mirror.”

While he was in England, though, he looked at the hair and the beard and decided he was hiding behind them.

“I wanted to be OK with just looking at myself. As soon as I shaved it off, it felt great.”

Even before the dreads, Duritz had long hair, so now he loves taking a quick shower or just running water over his head under a faucet and being able to towel off quickly instead of waiting six hours for it to dry.

“I loved having them, and I absolutely loved getting rid of them.”