You got a sense of the breadth of Adam Schlesinger’s talent from the tributes. There were people from alternative rock: Ted Leo, Dashboard Confessional. There were people from Hollywood and theatre: Tom Hanks and Fran Drescher. There were TV personalities (Kathy Griffin) and politicians (New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy) and novelists (Stephen King). There was the superstar producer who summed it all up: “Adam Schlesinger took pop music writing to its classiest and most untouchable place,” said Jack Antonoff. “An honour to live at the same time he made his work.”
So many people, from so many different strands, because Schlesinger wasn’t one thing; he was a musical omnivore. He was the Grammy-winning rock musician with Fountains of Wayne; he was the pop sophisticate of Ivy; he was the songwriter providing faux hits for movies about musicians (That Thing You Do!, for which he was nominated for an Oscar, Hugh Grant’s 80s pop hit in Music and Lyrics); he was the writer who soundtracked a musical TV series (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) and who wrote for Sesame Street. He even managed to pick up an Emmy for a song written for a different awards show – his musical pastiche It’s Not Just for Gays Anymore, for the 2011 Tony Awards – and then do it again with another song for the same ceremony the following year. There was seemingly no style he could not master. He was, genuinely, one of the pop geniuses of the past quarter-century.
Schlesinger’s work was borne of a deep love of and respect for songcraft. “For me it’s just more satisfying when you follow the rules rather than just make a bunch of sounds,” he told me in 2011. “The magic of just making noise in the studio goes away after a while. That’s not to say I don’t sometimes respond to music just for the sound of it. But writing something within those old song formats is just harder to do than making a bunch of noise.”
I fell in love to the sound of Fountains of Wayne. I got married in March 1997 and we honeymooned in the south. I picked up a cassette of the band’s debut album on the first day, and we hammered it as we drove around the Carolinas and Georgia. These were songs perfectly tailored for driving around America, flush with love: choruses so big they seemed to turn a hard-top into a convertible; lyrics so wry each line held a new treasure. They became “our band” – we went to see Fountains of Wayne at festivals, in clubs, in theatres. We insisted to our friends that they needed to hear this band. When they finally had an actual hit, with Stacy’s Mom in 2003, I was thrilled other people were paying attention.
I loved Fountains of Wayne so much that when they disappointed me I took it personally: the gigs where Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood seemed slightly underwhelmed, like superstar football players forced to turn out in a midweek cup tie against a lower-division team. But the records never let me down.
There were obvious antecedents for Fountains of Wayne – the chunky powerpop of Cheap Trick, the sharp observations of Squeeze – but as time went on, the group’s distinctive voice became more and more pronounced. The “hits”, such as there were, tended to be the uptempo tracks with the slightly snarky lyrics, but as I got older I came to love more the gentler, more heartfelt songs. I don’t know who wrote what, because Collingwood sang everything and all the songs were credited to both, but I’m not sure it really matters. Fountains of Wayne songs were Fountains of Wayne songs, and the voice I heard in the sad, empathetic numbers I came to love – Sick Day, Fire Island, Hey Julie, Hackensack, The Man in the Santa Suit – was clear and distinct.
So I don’t know if it was Collingwood or Schlesinger who wrote my favourite Fountains of Wayne song, the one I put on when news came through that he was seriously ill with coronavirus. It’s a song about failed love whose chorus translates to these days, wholly accidentally: “Maybe one day soon it will all come out / How you dream about each other sometimes / With the memory of how you once gave up / But you made it through the troubled times.”
I hope you make it through the troubled times. And I mourn Adam Schlesinger.
