"Washington Square" is the seventh track on Counting Crows' 2008 album Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, and the track that opens the Sunday Mornings half of the album.
In early 2008, Duritz explained the meaning of the song in concert[1]:
| “ | This is about my neighborhood and it’s about leaving it behind.
This is a song I started right after I moved here. I’d come back from tour, and I’d lost something, someone, and I was kinda faced with the prospect of going back out again, and it seemed like a hard thing to leave New York behind. It’s a song about making a choice, to change, to go back to doing your life, to go on the road. But it’s also a song about how much you give up or risk giving up when you do that. |
” |
One lyric in the song (And I heard the songbirds of Ballyporeen...) is a reference to friend and fellow songwriter Gemma Hayes, who previously co-wrote the track "Hazy" with Duritz for Counting Crows' 2003 live album New Amsterdam: Live at Heineken Music Hall.