Coldplay’s Web site reports that the band has been recording its new album in Barcelona, incorporating “sounds and flavors of Latin America and Spain.” So far, though, frontman Chris Martin has said squat about the opus, until he broke his silence to update the Smoking Section. “I don’t want to say too much,” Martin tells us. “But I’ll say that the producers we’re working with” — that would be Brian Eno and his longtime collaborator Markus Dravs — “are fucking amazing.” Martin loves technology as much as Kip Dynamite — he and the band have spent hours on their computers referencing their favorite works, for their own sordid purposes. “We can be working on something and go, ‘We should steal this from My Bloody Valentine and this from Rammstein and this from Jay-Z’s first album, and then listen to this classical piece by Holst,’ ” he says. “It’s a plagiarist’s paradise. We used to just be able to steal off Radiohead. Now we can steal off everybody.”

* * * *

We’ll admit it, the Counting Crows‘ 1993 debut, August and Everything After, is a modern classic. (Revisit it in a new deluxe edition featuring outtakes and a hot live disc.) Therefore, we were stoked when Adam Duritz dropped bythe S.S. offices in New York to play us songs from the Crows’ fantastic upcoming disc, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, a record about disillusionment and disintegration. “Some of the worst things I’ve ever said about myself are in these songs,” says Duritz, who has lost almost sixty pounds recently and says he has finally found a combo of meds that helps him deal with his “mental illness.” He cites cuts like “Los Angeles” (co-written with Ryan Adams and Dave Gibbs, about “getting wasted on Hollywood Boulevard”) and the rocker “1492,” which sounds like a punk Crazy Horse. “That song is about being drunk in an underground Italian club and getting a blow job from some nameless model,” says Duritz. “And going down on her as the sun comes up.”
Believe it!

* * * *

The S.S. was happy to hear that our pal Albert Hammond Jr. will soon re-enter Electric Lady Studios to knock out his second solo album. “After I finished the first record, everything was just a cherry,” he says. “Now that I’ve played all these shows” — 128, to be exact — “I’ve shown that this is not a novelty act, that I can do it.” His demos of songs like “Miss Myrtle,” “Rocket” and “In My Room” sound sick, not to mention the ten-minute masterwork “Spooky Couch.” Look for video updates on Berto’s MySpace page, and start getting jazzed about the next disc from his other band, the Strokes. “We have the luxury of time,” he says. “We’re not going anywhere.”