Counting Crows: Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings

 Counting Crows Keep Kickin’ Out the Jams

It’s Springtime. Soon it will be Summer. One of my favorite things to do during this most cozy time of year is to drive with the windows down and a prime CD cranked to 11 blasting from my stock speakers. Thankfully, I have been able to add such a crankable disc to my collection just in time. The latest offering from Counting Crows, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings  (Out this week, March 25,  Geffen/Interscope) is a straight ahead rock album that will please and comfort longtime fans and remind the fair-weather “Mister Jones” loving, bandwagon riders that even though the success of the bands breakthrough, August and Everything After, is now a decade past, the bands vitality and ability to rock are still undeniably present.  In the halcyon days of the mid-nineties, Adult-Alternative stars The Jayhawks, Grant-Lee Buffalo and The Counting Crows were getting their first taste of stardom and sold-out clubs across the states.  The public welcomed a non-grunge version of rock, both with a countrified twang as well as the more straight-ahead version that Adam Duritz and gang offered.  Now, near the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium, the public again is seeking out pure rock without the mood swings and girly- jeans of Emo, or the screeching caterwauls of Metal.  The commercial success of Springsteen‘s latest, the critical praise of The Hold Steady and the continued canonizing of Wilco (of which I am guilty) display this need for simple and straight-forward Rock. 

The title of the disc foreshadows some of the lyrical themes that play a prominent role in the album’s progression.  Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings represent the two ends of a distressful, yet hopeful spectrum that Duritz describes as dissolving 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.” In “Sundays,” Duritz sings in the chorus “I don’t believe in anything at all.” Given the album’s theme I can’t help but feel that the narrator trying to convince himself so that Saturday night’s deeds don’t seem quite as decadent.

The disc opens with the scathing guitar screams of “1492.“  This proved to be a notice that this album would have a different overall vibe than many of the more pop-driven offering from the Crow’s more recent past.  A few cuts down the list displays a down-shift in tempo with “Washington Square” and “Any Sunday Morning.”  Both tracks showcase Duritz’s trademark vocal yearning that turned “Long December” and “’Round Here” into massive hits.  “Cowboys” came the closest to mimicking the hits from the past. With its tempo changes and guitar arrangement I could hear “Rain King” replaying in my brain from the one time I caught Counting Crows in concert back in 1997. There are tons of bands that hit it big, cash it in and milk their once adoring public for all they can as they distribute sub-par, rehashed ditties from their big-marketing-push glory days.  Too many times also, the public can confuse Top 40 charts with relevance and artistic productivity.  Thankfully, Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings reminds us that we shouldn’t be worried about the Counting Crows dragging up old karaoke versions of their hits and will keep us from confusing the successes of their past with a lack of promise for success in the present day.