On March 25, 2008, Counting Crows will release their fifth studio album (and their first in five years), ‘Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings’, on Geffen/Interscope.

‘Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings’ is just your average brilliant, unsparing rock & roll song cycle about the high life and the low life, about sin and whatever the hell follows. This is an album with two distinct yet deeply related halves:

‘Saturday Nights’ – the album’s angry, electric, dissolute opening salvo – was produced by Gil Norton (The Pixies, Foo Fighters). The more acoustic and folk-influenced ‘Sunday Mornings’ was produced by Brian Deck whose past credits include Modest Mouse and Iron & Wine.

Free Counting Crows downloads:

“1492″ MP3
“When I Dream Of Michelangelo” MP3
from ‘Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings’

For Adam Duritz, ‘Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings’ is “about dissolution and disintegration. It’s about when Saturday night happens and you lose all sense of yourself. And it’s about when you wake up Sunday morning and look back at the wreck you’ve made of your life and you think, ‘How can I possibly fix this? How can I ever climb out of this hole?’ And then you start to try and climb.”

Duritz says of the inspiration for the title, “When I finally realized what this record was about and that it was actually going to be two different records that fit together as one, the title popped into my head immediately. It’s a title that’s been used before in slightly different forms more than once, but none of them were the inspiration for my title. That came from a late night stop at a truck stop somewhere in Georgia while we were touring August and Everything After.

“One day I grabbed this bizarre looking double-cassette by Ralph Stanley called Saturday Night & Sunday Morning. After that, you had to fight me to get it out of the stereo. It’s just an unreal record about sin and redemption with inspired song choices and unearthly performances from Stanley himself and a sea of guests.

“These days, everybody wants to tell you how different every genre of music is and how one kind is good and another isn’t. But on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, country and bluegrass find a way to effortless prove that it’s all really just music. Our album may not have much redemption in the end but we got all the sin I could live with and at least an attempt to try for something better.”

Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings on amazon.com

Counting Crows on Myspace
Counting Crows Official Website