Counting Crows' Complete Sweets Tour Features Robe Gear

	In the song "Colorblind," Ostrowski manipulated the dark and negative spaces onstage by teasing particles of light into them. Photo: Demian Becerra ALIVECO

Lighting designer Conner Ostrowski, of Wide Open Productions, jointed the Counting Crows creative team earlier in 2025, as the Bay Area rockers hit the road with their Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets! album/world tour.

Ostrowski chose to work with Robe moving lights -- ten iFORTE LTXs, 16 iPointe65s, and 32 Spiiders -- at the core of an eye-catching lighting design with equipment supplied by Upstaging.

With no video elements onstage, all the visual emphasis was on lighting to support the band's latest musical venture. Upstaging -- with whom Ostrowski has worked on previous projects, including for electro duo Chromeo -- has a large inventory of Robe, but it was at Tennessee-based Pulse Lighting, owned and run by Preston and Paul Hoffman, where the designer initially "met and fell in love with Robe" products early on in his career. Ostrowski still uses the facilities at Pulse for much of his visualization work.

Wide Open Productions, Ostrowski's creative design studio, has as its mantra, "Design with purpose." The designer adds, "We don't necessarily pick the newest or trendiest fixtures just because we can or because they are available. Each design project is individually assessed and its creative treatment carefully thought through, with a mix of the right lighting products chosen to attain the best results."

Ahead of this tour, he received a brief from Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz, who likes theatrical contrasts and subtleties; he also likes see the lights and feel their impact on the fans.

Ostrowski wanted the iFORTES for key lighting and for shooting out into the crowd and creating those beamy rock looks and wow moments. He also chose these units because of reliability and good gobos. "There is no other fixture currently on the market where an animation wheel can be used fully zoomed out, and the effect still has so much presence," he says. "The punch and zoom ratios for creating these effects work brilliantly there and they kill it every time."

In the song "Colorblind," he manipulated the dark and negative spaces onstage by teasing particles of light into them, remarking that the LTXs remain extraordinarily bright and visible even with gobos in. The iPointes were rigged on 8' horizontal truss sections that were also mirrored up in the roof, enabling the fixtures to assist with stage coverage and low-level back light from all directions, immersing the band in lumens.

The overhead rig was raked, wrapping the stage to give it an additional edge, and the iPointes in the center of each pod kept the band immersed in light as they migrated around the stage. These needed to be IP-rated, as the US tour played a mix of indoor and outdoor gigs.

All the iFORTE LTXs and iPointes were connected to a remote followspotting system and could be selected for follow duties at any time.

The Spiiders were rigged on 16 pods -- nine in the air and seven on the floor -- all of which also contained an iPointe, effectively surrounding the band members and giving Ostrowskis a formidable toolbox to create layered, atmospheric scenes and big looks to accent more poignant moments with fine details.

The Spiiders were used in a truly multifunctional fashion. The pixelation and flower effects offered two additional texturing treatments, which Ostrowski could maximize, and he could also use them as standard wash lights.

Ostrowski is a "huge fan" of Robe's colors and color-mixing systems and the way that the RGBW chips are engineered to produce color gradients that can be shaped into stunning looks.

A set list was not available before the lighting programming started. Ostrowski was told to prepare for any song the group had ever recorded, running into hundreds of tracks. As the set evolved, it was honed down to 53 songs' worth of lighting cues.

Ostrowski and his two programmers, Mike Gionfriddo and Scott Huggins, along with the other creative team members, evolved the show. The Upstaging crew chief was Paul Mundrick, and lighting techs were Emil Vuorijarvi, Kendall Clark, and Hannah-Grace Harper. "They were fantastic, and I cannot thank them enough for the great support, knowledge, and fun we all had working together," Ostrowski says. Harper also managed the remote followspotting system.

Ostrowski also appreciated the "excellent" assistance from the team at Robe North America, and Upstaging, where he worked closely with account handler John Bahnick, project manager Josh Wagner, and special projects/Follow-Me programmer John Weston, with additional Follow-Me support from Chris Lose.

Keeping everything organized and running smoothly on the road for Counting Crows was production manager Shawn London and tour manager Tom Mullally.

For the subsequent seven-week European leg of the tour, Ostrowski ran lighting from an Avolites D9-330 console, supplied by Neg Earth. Working with a variety of control systems, he cut his programming/operating teeth on Avo, and in Europe, where the rigs were changing daily, the designer felt it was "exactly the right control platform for the job."