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.

"His music is, as it has always been, an intimate fusion of country and soul." - MOJO

"Listening to these deceptively simple lyrics and minimal arrangements is akin to being caressed by a warm summer breeze." - Rock 'n' Reel

A modern-day Renaissance man, Jeb Loy Nichols is a musician, songwriter and visual artist whose creative path has taken him from his birthplace in the Midwestern USA, to London and on to rural Wales. "I wanted to keep this one personal", says Jeb Loy Nichols. "Personal and small. It seems like that's the only way to keep outside all the nonsense that passes for the music business these days." For Jeb Loy, the personal has always been political. A small act of sacrifice, of defiance, of awkwardness, is often the starting point of these new songs.

His new record, Days Are Mighty, is an intimate portrayal of a simple life lived on the margins. "My last record", he says, "was all about being away from home. I went to Nashville and wrote a record about my relationship with America. This record is about my relationship with home." Days Are Mighty, like most home life, is deceptive. On the first listen it feels warm, comfortable, and safe. But like most home life, scratch the surface and you find a whole world of contradictions. Songs of loss, of separateness, of fear.

To keep the record simple, Jeb Loy chose to work with old friends. Jennifer Carr, a long time collaborator, is on keyboards. Andy Hamill, one of Jeb's closest friends, is on bass. Jonathan Lee is on drums. "Mates," Jeb Loy says, "one and all. A good time. Just us, talking. Just family."