"It was necessary to convince them (the record label) you can give a few things away and create enough goodwill that they come back and pay for it," he said. "People will pay for music. They just won't pay for music if they think you're an asshole."

In exchange, Duritz would compromise and allow the label to release "You Can't Count On Me" as the first single, a choice he wasn't entirely comfortable with. He's proud of the song, but thinks it needs to be heard in the context of the album. He would have preferred to release "1492," "Hanging Tree," or "Washington Square" as the first single, but he was willing to go along with the label — for a price.

"I said either you let us release '1492' and 'Michaelangelo' as a pair of digital downloads for free and put them everywhere we can over the 'net or I'm not having anything to do with it," said Duritz.

The label refused and Duritz pulled the album from the release schedule. It took a meeting with Interscope chairman Jimmy Iovine to break the impasse.

"I'll give this to Jimmy, he's been a visionary throughout his entire career with the stuff he's done," said Duritz. "We may disagree on some stuff musically, he may be more of a business guy than I am nowadays, but he had the vision to see that we had a plan. It worked. Those two songs introduced people to what our album was like, a lot of people. We sent it to every blog we could. Everybody got it. Everybody put it up or linked to it and people heard a picture of the record."

Things got contentious, but Duritz sees the problem not so much with the people at the label as with the system itself.  He encounters a lot of smart, creative people who work in the industry but they seem handcuffed by a bad system created by conglomerates that have everything to do with money and little to do with music.

With a compromise reached, "You Can't Count On Me" was released and Duritz got his digital 45. The results? Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200 album charts. Duritz doesn't believe in coincidences — at least not in this case.