Counting Crows

Counting Crows' 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 that will not only remind longtime admirers of what makes Counting Crows a great band in the first place – it reminded the band as well. “In my mind, we’re an album band -- that’s what we do,” Adam Duritz says of the band that also includes David Bryson, Charles Gillingham, Dan Vickery, David Immergluck and Jim Bogios. “We make good albums. I don’t know that we’re a great “singles” band. Now with the whole world going byte-sized, we felt, and still feel, like it’s more important than ever NOT to cooperate with all of that.” 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. For Duritz, Saturday Nights &Sunday Mornings is “about dissolution and disintegration. It’s about when Saturday night happens and you lose all sense of yourself. You dissolve into drink and medications and moral lack of self, and finally into a loss of faith and then madness. 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.” But Saturday Nights &Sunday Mornings isn’t an album about sin and redemption; it’s more the binge and the hangover. Saturday Nights &Sunday Mornings is a remarkable album about the lives that Duritz has led -- at least in his head -- as brought to life by the only band that could make it all sound this real and this raw.