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.

After aggressively touring for five years, lead singer Adam Duritz explained he had, emotionally and physically, reached a nadir:

At the end of it I had totally lost my mind. Not that I wasn't doing it for 20 years already, but there was this moment when my grandmother died and I lost this girl I had been dating all in the same five-minute moment, where I got the phone call from both of them at the same moment, while sitting in a hotel room in Perth [Australia], literally the most isolated city on Earth. There is no other major city that is as far from other cities as Perth on earth. And the sense of being so far from everywhere I was supposed to be in life was so palpable. That was the egg cracking. There wasn't much egg left anyway, but that just cracked me. After that, I just stopped. We played some gigs, but I was essentially done. I walked off the plane to go to the funeral. I mean, I almost didn't do that, and then we didn’t do anything for a while. I mean, we played. We still toured every summer. We did some gigs here and there, but I didn't want to make any more records. I knew I didn't know how to live anymore. I knew I had lost my mind. I knew that I'd never make it through another tour, but I also thought, "You can't stop fucking around with this. This is really serious mental illness and you've got to figure out your life before you go and do this again, because there's nowhere lower that you can go." I was wrong about that actually; it did get a lot worse.

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":

Suddenly, I thought, “We have to go in the studio now. Right now.” Everyone came to NYC in June—I still wasn't capable of leaving home—and we did 20 days or something. We got the basis of Saturday Nights, which is all the record was at that time. Then we went on tour, and afterward I just went completely down the pipe and we never went back to work on it.

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.