Fountains Of Wayne have begun work on their first studio album since 2003. The group has already logged time at Bearsville Studios near Woodstock in upstate New York and plans to resume work this month at Stratosphere Studios in Manhattan, co-owned by the Fountains' Adam Schlesinger, former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha and Ivy's Andy Chase.

"The Woodstock stuff was fun because we tried a slightly different approach, at least for a few days," Schlesinger tells Billboard.com. "For lack of a better word, we jammed a bit in the studio, which is something we've never done before. We really wanted to give [drummer] Brian [Young] and [guitarist] Jody [Porter] a little bit more of a chance to contribute to musical ideas. I think the record will end up being a combination of doing it the way we've always done it and trying different stuff like that."

Although the Woodstock session didn't yield any finished songs, "What it yielded is tons and tons of ideas," Schlesinger says. "We didn't even try to turn them into finished songs on the spot. Now we've got to go back and actually make them into something. There are some other songs that are fully written that we just haven't done on an album yet, but we didn't get into those up in Woodstock."

As for a potential release date, Schlesinger says, "We're certainly shooting for sometime this year if we can pull it together." The album will be the follow-up to 2003's "Welcome Interstate Managers," which has sold 417,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

The group also has two performances on its schedule: Saturday (Jan. 21) at Mountain Creek Resort in Vernon, N.J., and a week later at New York's Lincoln Center as part of the American Songbook Series. "It was originally billed as acoustic but I think we'll do it as a full band, with somebody playing an acoustic guitar," Schlesinger says with a laugh.