Last month Counting Crows released Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did On Our Summer Vacation). It’s the Berkeley, California-born band’s sixth studio album, a stunningly low number considering the Adam Duritz-led group issued their debut, August And Everything After, way back in 1993.

I lost track of Counting Crows after 2002’s Hard Candy, a set I enjoyed for its warm embrace of sunshiny pop melodies. I missed their next album, Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, which took six years to surface. But while cleaning up some saved links yesterday, I happened to read that Underwater Sunshine — their first album since splitting from longtime label Geffen Records — was an all-covers collection. That got my attention.

Songs by Bob Dylan, Big Star, and Teenage Fanclub made the cut for Underwater Sunshine, but the bulk of the covers will ring unfamiliar to most (Kasey Anderson & The Honkies, Pure Prairie League, The Romany Rye, Coby Brown). “It’s definitely a music geek’s covers album,” Duritz tells Alternative Addiction. “We’ve always liked the idea of introducing people to cool songs. Some of them weren’t going to be well known which is why we wanted to introduce them to people. We didn’t really think of it consciously when we started the record but I’m really happy with it actually.”

One of the covers that got my attention was Travis’ “Coming Around,” a single from the expanded 2000 edition of the Scottish band’s breakthrough album, 1999’s The Man Who.

Interestingly, one of the B-sides for the “Coming Around” single was cover of The Band’s “The Weight.” Just a month ago, I featured Aretha Franklin’s amazing interpretation of the tune after Levon Helm died (he was Travis’ Fran Healy’s favorite drummer).

In an interview with Paste Magazine, Duritz recalled being introduced to Travis’ music years ago when the bands shared a bill on a European festival circuit. “With Travis, seeing them live they were much more rock then the record. Live, it’s a really big rock-stomp thing. I was blown away. I’m guessing our version doesn’t sound much like the recorded version; I bet it sounds like a live version from back then.”

Recording Underwater Sunshine was a refreshing change of pace for Counting Crows, says Duritz. “It was really nice to play others peoples music and to explore other kinds of syntax, other kinds of wording, other sorts of melodies or rhythms that I wouldn’t normally write. There’s so many things to explore musically that we’re totally capable of doing, but that I wouldn’t normally write. As a musician I really got off on that.”

As for new music from Travis, Fran Healy says they’re targeting the first half of 2020.

Purchase Counting Crows – “Coming Around” (Travis cover) via iTunes, Amazon MP3.

Buy Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did On Our Summer Vacation) via iTunes and get a live version of Madonna’s “Borderline,” which Counting Crows first posted for free on their website in 2009 with the note announcing their departure from Geffen.