Follow-Me Powers Counting Crows’ The Complete Sweets! Tour Across North America

Counting Crows brought their highly anticipated The Complete Sweets! Tour to audiences across North America during the summer months of 2025, in support of their album Butter Miracle: The Complete Sweets!, taking in major stops including Nashville, Boston, New Orleans, and Las Vegas. At the heart of the show’s lighting design was manual performer tracking system, Follow-Me 3D. The system was deployed by rental company and vendor Upstaging, with lighting design by Conner Ostrowski of Wide Open Productions. The North American leg was followed by a UK and European run.

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Ostrowski, working with Counting Crows for the first time, quickly discovered that the band’s dynamic, multi-instrument performances demanded an equally dynamic approach to lighting. “The band, and Adam [Duritz, Lead Singer] specifically, are very theatrical, and everybody’s playing multiple instruments; they pass the light around the stage depending on who’s soloing,” says Ostrowski. “On shows in the past, they’ve had a lot of heavy downstage front lights and four dedicated front of house old school follow spots for every single show. With this year’s design, we wanted to get super dramatic and theatrical, but also still have this rock and roll vibe.”
The result was a complete departure from traditional follow spotting. Ostrowski worked with Follow-Me Designer Relations Chris Lose from the outset to design the system not as a conventional follow spot replacement, but as a full creative design element that enhances both precision and artistic expression across the entire lighting design. Meanwhile, John Weston, Mike Gionfriddo and Scott Huggins were responsible for programming the Follow-Me system, with Hannah-Grace Harper serving as Follow-Me Tech on the road.

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The rig connected many fixtures to Follow-Me every day, including 10 Robe iForte LTX, 20 Elation Proteus Brutus, 16 Robe iPointes, and a downstage ground row of 12 Chroma-Q Color Force II 48s.

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Proximity Control proved to be one of the most valuable features for a band whose members move freely around the stage. “There are four main guys standing downstage running around, and sometimes other guys will come down, the drummer, the keyboard player, whoever, and as they run back and forth across that line of foot lights, we don’t have to worry about it,” explains Ostrowski. “The technology takes care of it for us and lights them up as needed.”

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The flexibility of the system allowed Ostrowski to push the creative boundaries of what performer tracking can do. Rather than statically assigning key light fixtures, almost every song featured a different group of fixtures assigned to each target, driven by song macros in the show file. “Instead of just parking lights on people and saying, ‘these are your key lights for the show’, we would grab a different group of fixtures for each target for almost every single song,” he adds.

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The choice of high-output fixtures, the iForte LTX and Proteus Brutus, meant that the lights retained their full functionality even while being used for tracking, complete with colour, gobos, and animation wheels. “There would be moments where the Fortes could break away from their people and shoot a big gobo breakup out into the crowd that lit up the entire venue,” says Ostrowski. “There was one moment where all the key light would go red and the animation wheels would come in and make this super dramatic, spooky, chaotic vibe on stage during a breakdown, and then snap back into their regular spot looks in a matter of seconds. These are things you definitely cannot do with traditional follow spots.”

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Upstaging’s support throughout the tour drew particular praise. “I was really surprised and impressed with how dialled in that system was, and how quickly Hannah-Grace was able to get things updated from day to day,” says Ostrowski. “Follow-Me makes life on tour so much easier.”

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Reflecting on the experience, Ostrowski is adamant about the impact of the technology: “Follow-Me just takes a lot of the variables out of the equation and gives us control over the creativeness of the show. It’s a powerful system, it was perfect for Counting Crows, and it’s a huge game changer.”

For more information, please visit our website at www.follow-me.com  

About Follow-Me
Follow-Me specializes in advanced performer tracking solutions for a wide range of productions, from international tours and TV broadcasts to theatrical performances and theme parks. Our products are designed to meet the challenging demands of concert touring, in- and outdoor live events, theatrical and AV industry, ensuring top-quality performance tracking for lighting, immersive audio, video mapping and stage automation applications in any environment.
Follow-Me: Independent Flexible Scalable

Photos Credits: Nicolas LeTellier: @nicklphoto / @aliveco Demian Becerra: @theholymountain / @aliveco

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