I know you want me to make fun of Adam Duritz.

Why wouldn't you? He's a star of Adult Contemporary radio. He has elevated celebrity dating to a sport. He's a white guy with fake dreads. (He says they're extensions.) I want to make fun of him, too. He seems like a real douche.

And this interview was the perfect opportunity to confirm his douchiness for the ages. It was orchestrated by a publicist who asked, several times, that I talk specifically about the new Counting Crows album, Somewhere Under Wonderland.

I was so ready to make fun of Adam Duritz, you have no idea. Until we began talking. Of course, I knew about his mental illness going into the interview, but I didn't realize how noticeable an effect it appeared to have on his personality. The longtime Counting Crows singer suffers from Depersonalization Disorder, which makes the mind feel disengaged from the body and one's surroundings, for periods lasting from minutes to months. Duritz in 2008. He says it dooms all his relationships and has left him a lonely man in his 50th year.

"It's like the world doesn't seem very real, I don't know," Duritz said. "I really hoped it would go away, or that I would find the right medication so it didn't affect me anymore, or that I would just go to therapy and could think my way around it. But none of that has happened."

Duritz's speech seemed surprisingly childlike. Beneath the familiar rasp and occasional laughter, some basic social cues seem lacking, such as the ability to comprehend when a joke is made or a subject needs changing because of the ticking clock. He could have just had a long night, or maybe he couldn't hear me as well as I could him. But it would explain a lot about behavior that uninformed observers might consider self-indulgent or, well, douchey.

In fact, if there's any stereotype that Duritz fits, it's the tortured artist. And not just the Thom Yorke kind. In my 20 years of interviewing celebrities, I don't think I've ever run across an interview subject who sounded more depressed, or was more willing to talk about his depression.

"I've gotten a lot of shit together in the last six or seven years," Duritz said. "And there's a lot of areas of my life that are functioning very well. I might not ever be all right, but I can function in a lot of ways. I can run a band and a crew, and I can write songs and play them really well."

Released earlier this month, Somewhere Under Wonderland is being hailed by some prominent music critics as the best Counting Crows album since 1993's August and Everything After.

"I think it's a great record," Duritz said. "I love it. But I would have said that about every record. I like a lot of them more than August."

Duritz denied what seems like it might be the only upside of his affliction: that it helps him write great lonely, emotionally distant songs like 1996’s “A Long December” or the new track “Dislocation.” (Sample lyric: “I am rich and in the radio./I'm fading out in stereo./I don't remember me./Dislocation, dislocation.”)

"There's nothing, and I mean nothing, positive about it," Duritz said. "That's, like, a romantic notion. There's nothing about it that's good, as far as I'm concerned."

Especially not romantically, according to Duritz.

"I think I probably have found the right person, more than once, but I've been unable to live with them," he said. "I have this dissociative disorder which makes other people emotionally a very dicey proposition to deal with."

This was the perfect lead-in to a discussion about Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox, whom Duritz dated back-to-back in the '90s. Could he have just referenced one of them? It's not only rude to bring it up, it's unoriginal, since nearly every article written about Duritz mentions his famous "Friends" at least in passing. But that fact alone, I felt, also made it my job to at least try.

I eased into the topic by asking if Duritz ever regretted the decision to openly date these and other female celebrities. (He's also been linked with Emmy Rossum and Mary-Louise Parker.)

That's when Duritz’s publicist interrupted, revealing her presence on the line and admonishing me with "no more personal questions, please." To his credit, Duritz overrode the warning.

"I don't like that it became the only thing they wrote, but that's their problem," he said, referring to the tabloids. "It wasn't great for me, it wasn't great for my band. But it's nothing I did. I'm not gonna link people's idiocy to my choices, because those were perfectly reasonable choices. They were nice girls and I went out with them and that was that."

Holy crap is this guy not a douche. Then and there, I wanted to join the Counting Crows fan club and to defend his honor to snarky music Facebook groups and to the punk band Down By Law, which recorded a 1996 song called "Counting Crows Must Die."

For the time being, however, I had our interview to conclude, which was difficult because I was still processing my reaction while staring at a page full of questions written when I was still in making-fun-of-Adam-Duritz mode. I picked the least obnoxious one, a reference to a less-somber topic that might spark some frivolity. I asked Duritz what it would take for him to shave his dreads. Specifically, if we started a Kickstarter campaign to make that happen, how much would it cost us?

"What?" Duritz replied. "Why would you want to do that?"

This guy just laid bare his damaged soul to me. So, to repay him, I brought up his 1995 girlfriends and asked oddball questions about his hair. I felt like one of my own schoolyard tormentors from middle school.

"I don't understand the question," Duritz said.

Mission accomplished. I set out to poke fun of a douche in this article and that's exactly what happened.

That douche is me.