Music for Cougars

In the six-year gap between Music for Cougars and Sugar Ray's previous album In the Pursuit of Leisure, some of the band members started families, while singer Mark McGrath began focusing on roles in the media industry. This included a role as host of entertainment news program Extra, which he began in 2004. Since they were no longer working with a major label on Music for Cougars, the band said they had less pressure on them than with previous albums. The track "She’s Got the (Woo-Hoo)" includes the lyric "She comes when she's ready/She's Sex and the City/She'll bring you to your knees", which lyrically parodies the television series Sex and the City. When asked what the song's title meant, McGrath replied in 2009, "well, really you can't be so literal. If you make it so obvious there's no song. Whatever floats your boat. Whatever woo-hoo you need. I mean, it could be about your dog, you know?." Title The title references the largely female fanbase Sugar Ray started attracting following the release of their 1997 album Floored. Regarding their audience, Rodney Sheppard said in 2009 "for the most part, we’ve always had a real variety, from skinheads with mohawks, to moms with their daughters. Granted, the majority is women in their 30s and 40s seeing us." Sheppard also said that "we don’t want to exclude the guys who still come out, and some kids. We're curious to see how young of an audience we can attract now." ==Commercial performance==

The album was not as successful commercially as previous Sugar Ray albums. It reached number eighty on the Billboard 200 chart, with none of the album's three singles charting. Shortly before the album's release, McGrath told the New York Post that "there are no commercial concerns for Sugar Ray now. Sure we'd love to sell a million records, who wouldn't? But look, when a U2 record and a Guns N' Roses record both [recently] fail commercially, it’s far from us to think we can sell millions." ==Reception==

Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic awarded the album three-and-half out of five stars. He wrote "they make no bones about making Music for Cougars, those cougars being the very girls that shook their hips to 'Fly' back in 1997 and are looking for a little bit of the same breezy vibe 12 years later, a little bit of sexy nostalgia to get them through their summer, a soundtrack to a few girls' nights out." Entertainment Weekly's Leah Greenblatt gave it a B rating and also compared it their previous material, writing that they are "still churning out affable pop-rock for various beer-commercial activities (beach volleyball, slo-mo water-balloon fights)." Brian McElhiney of The Daily Gazette said in August 2009 that the album title "seems appropriate, after all, the younger female audience the southern California group began cultivating with its 1997 breakout smash hit 'Fly' and other subsequent breezy summer anthems have all grown up along with the band." However, he added that "from the sugar-coated pop that broke them, to the band’s early funk-metal freakouts — it’s hard for even the band's members to know just what audience will come out to the shows." ==Track listing==

• "Girls Were Made to Love" (featuring Collie Buddz) (includes a sample from Eddie Hodges' "(Girls, Girls, Girls) Made to Love", 1962) – 3:38 • "Boardwalk" – 3:26 • "She's Got the (Woo-Hoo)" – 3:35 • "Love Is the Answer" (cover of a previously unreleased Weezer track, written by and featuring Rivers Cuomo; later reworked and re-recorded for Weezer's Raditude) – 3:57 • "Rainbow" – 3:17 • "Closer" – 3:33 • "When We Were Young" – 3:21 • "Going Nowhere" – 2:49 • "Love 101" – 3:17 • "Last Days" – 3:33 • "Morning Sun" – 3:44 • "Dance Like No One's Watchin'" (featuring Donavon Frankenreiter) – 3:53 ==References==