Recommended Albums
Fountains Of Wayne
Fountains of Wayne is an American rock band that formed in New York City in 1996. The band consists of Chris Collingwood, Adam Schlesinger, Jody Porter, and Brian Young. The band is best known for their 2003 Grammy-nominated single “Stacy’s Mom”. In 1996, the band released its self-titled debut, which spawned the singles “Radiation Vibe” and “Sink to the Bottom” and, the band toured the world extensively behind their debut album, playing alongside bands such as The Smashing Pumpkins, Sloan and The Lemonheads. That same year, Schlesinger wrote the Academy Award-nominated, RIAA gold-certified title song for the film That Thing You Do!. In 1999, the band released Utopia Parkway, an album named after a road in Queens, New York. The album was a concept record that dealt with life in modern suburbia. Utopia Parkway was received well by critics, garnering many favorable reviews, and was the album of the week in People magazine. The group once again toured extensively behind the album, but frustrations grew between the band and the label. The band was later dropped by Atlantic in late 1999. In 2003, the band released Welcome Interstate Managers, a successful album that spawned the Grammy-nominated RIAA gold-certified hit single “Stacy’s Mom.” In 2007, the band released Traffic and Weather, an album which included the song “I-95”, which Rolling Stone named #54 of the year’s top 100 songs. In 2011, the band released their final album Sky Full of Holes and then promptly broke up soon after. (Source: Wikipedia)
Adam Schlesinger passed away from complications related to COVID-19 on April 1, 2020.
In Memory of Adam Schlesinger – “That Thing You Do” – by Carl Cafarelli
Singer, songwriter, musician, and producer Adam Schlesinger was born on October 31st of 1967. He was too young to really remember the 1960s, on the scene too late to experience Beatlemania, the British Invasion, the debut of The Monkees, the effervescent zeitgeist of a pop music revolution that encompassed Motown, The Dave Clark Five, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Lesley Gore, The Knickerbockers, girl groups, surf groups, and James Brown on The TAMI Show. He did not grow up watching Shindig! and Hullabaloo on TV, he would have only seen Batman and Star Trek in syndicated reruns. He wasn’t yet two years old when Neil Armstrong declared one small step for a man was one giant leap for mankind. He lived the first years of his life in the ’60s, but he could not possibly have retained any substantive memories of that defining decade.
Somehow, Adam Schlesinger served the best pop legacies of the ’60s with greater grace and verve than anyone else you could name. He did it the only way a creative soul knows how to do it: instinctively, intuitively. Artfully. He didn’t experience the wonders of the ’60s first-hand. But when one of his projects called for it, he could conjure an effective flash of period verisimilitude untainted by mere nostalgia or bloodless hucksterism. It was just that thing he did.
All of the above kinda side-steps what most would consider Schlesinger’s greater body of work, with his groups Ivy and Fountains Of Wayne, and also the bulk of his voluminous film and television songwriting and production credits, from There’s Something About Mary through Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I can’t even apologize for my tunnel-vision in that regard. Because Schlesinger was essential to two ’60s-related gems that have meant the world to me. In 2016, he produced The Monkees’ triumphant Good Times! album, a highlight in an otherwise miserable year. a year that robbed us of Prince and David Bowie (among others) and exchanged them all for the awful reality of a President-Elect Trump. And in 1996, he channeled everything I loved about the ’60s into a magic, frothy concoction that served as the title theme for my favorite movie, That Thing You Do!