Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is the fifth studio album by American rock band Counting Crows, released in the United States on March 25, 2008. It is thematically divided into two sides: the rock music of Saturday Nights and the more country-influenced Sunday Mornings. Vocalist and lyricist Adam Duritz states that the album "is about really wanting to mean something and failing to do it. You want your life to mean something. You want to be somebody and then what you turn out to be is so much less than what you thought you were going to be." The Saturday Nights portion was produced by Gil Norton (who also produced the band's second album, Recovering the Satellites), while Sunday Mornings was produced by Brian Deck, perhaps best known for his production work on Modest Mouse's album The Moon and Antarctica. The album debuted at number 3 on the Billboard 200, the band's highest peak since Recovering the Satellites and it sold 106,000 copies in first week. The cover depicts the Empire State Building in New York City. Recording After aggressively touring for five years, lead singer Adam Duritz explained he had, emotionally and physically, reached a nadir: However, Duritz acknowledged that, upon listening to "1492" (then an out-take from the Hard Candy sessions) that he began thinking: "There's this album here": After initial slow progress, Duritz has mentioned that, realizing Gil Norton was scheduled to produce the Foo Fighters' record "Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace" at the beginning of March, the band agreed to reconvene with Norton for another several weeks to complete the material at hand. Despite the band initially intending to release a single album under the "Saturday Nights" concept, Duritz began contemplating a companion piece for the record as they were finalizing their existing material: Duritz claimed the band's decision to draft Brian Deck as the producer for the "Sunday Mornings" half of the record came out of frequent Internet research: After some initial studio sessions and brainstorming, Duritz then realized a thematic significance and cohesion of the two records: Duritz also described the recording process for "You Can't Count On Me": From mid-March through mid-April 2007, the band recorded "Sunday Mornings" in Berkeley. After Duritz took a two-week break, the band would reconvene with their engineer James Brown to mix the "Saturday Nights" half of the record from late-April to mid-May, followed finally by over three