Fountains of Wayne excelled at this sort of sonic alchemy, blending irresistible, sticky-sweet hooks with often melancholy and faintly bitter lyrics and themes, a practice that reached its apex on 2003’s Welcome Interstate Managers.
To belabor the music-as-food metaphor just a bit further, it’s a record that tastes — and sounds — as satisfying now as it did upon release, albeit slightly more vinegary, owing to co-founder, bassist, singer and songwriter Adam Schlesinger’s untimely death from COVID-19 in early 2020. What stands as a band’s finest hour also functions as a grim reminder that such an achievement from this collection of musicians is no longer possible.
Even so, it’s nice to imagine an alternate universe where Fountains of Wayne’s hit single “Stacy’s Mom” had ushered in a period of whip-smart power pop that dominates radio airplay and the record charts, and lifts the band to new, previously unscaled heights of popularity.
Nice thoughts, sure, but unfortunately, reality had other plans. The single, taken from Managers, the band’s third studio album, would be the quartet’s only significant hit for the duration of its existence. While it’s technically accurate to describe Fountains of Wayne as one-hit-wonders, doing so feels like grossly underselling what the quartet accomplished in its nearly two-decade existence.
Even now, “Stacy’s Mom,” which has in the years since its release been used to hawk Dr Pepper and Cadillac SUVs, often seems appreciated more for its ironic early aughts-ness than for its deft songcraft.
Perhaps being surprised at such an outcome is beside the point. After all, especially with the benefit of 20 years’ hindsight, it’s possible to see, even now, how such sophisticated yet straightforward pop music was doomed to an existence on the cultural margins.
A quick scan of Billboard’s Top Hot 100 songs for 2003 indicates hip-hop’s increasing chokehold on pop music — 50 Cent’s “In da Club,” Sean Paul’s “Get Busy,” Chingy’s “Right Thurr” — alongside unremarkable, beige rock music (3 Doors Down’s “When I’m Gone,” Kid Rock’s “Picture”). This isn’t to say anyone should feel too poorly for Fountains of Wayne, a band with ample self-awareness, as Schlesinger demonstrated in a 2007 interview with The A.V. Club: “I think people sometimes confuse ‘catchy’ with something that should automatically be a hit in today’s world. I mean, obviously we write a lot of stuff that’s catchy, that sticks in your head.
“But that doesn’t necessarily mean that middle-school kids are going to want to listen to a song about a lawyer or a Subaru, or whatever. ... I think if there’s any kind of distance between the person who’s singing and the voice of the song, that throws people, or can throw people.”
Regardless of an audience’s appetite for the consumption of gleaming melodies juxtaposed with wry lyrics, the band — co-founder, lead singer and guitarist Chris Collingwood, lead guitarist Jody Porter, drummer Brian Young and Schlesinger — was already at a bit of a low point prior to making Managers, having been dropped from Atlantic Records after 1999’s Utopia Parkway failed to make an impression.
“When we were between labels, it was a little hard on us,” Schlesinger told American Songwriter in 2005. “I think Chris felt especially bummed during that whole period. He just sort of felt that we worked for a really long time, and it didn’t really add up to anything. And it didn’t seem like the future had much in the way of promise.”
That grim mentality provides the 16 songs on Managers, produced by Schlesinger, Collingwood and Mike Denneen, with a dark undertow, evident from the opening lines of the album’s first track, “Mexican Wine”: “He was killed by a cellular phone explosion/They scattered his ashes across the ocean.”
So it goes throughout the album, a series of middle-class strivers and hopers and dreamers, nearly all of whom become waylaid by circumstance or are snapped out of reveries by reality.
Managers, somehow, feels both dense and light. Although the run time is less than an hour and most of the songs clock in right around the 3:30 mark, the novelistic detail, vivid language and engrossing themes provide a profound sense of heft.
While it’s technically accurate to describe Fountains of Wayne as one-hit-wonders, doing so feels like grossly underselling what the quartet accomplished in its nearly two-decade existence.
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To wit, “Stacy’s Mom” is a fizzy power-pop confection, but one laced with heavy doses of lyrical denial. “I know that you think it’s just a fantasy/But since your dad walked out/Your mom could use a guy like me,” Collingwood sings against a melody evoking the glory years of Ric Ocasek’s work in the Cars.
It’s a formula Schlesinger and Collingwood return to again and again throughout the record, which yields a fair crop of songs, like “Hackensack,” “Valley Winter Song” or “Hey Julie,” any one of which the band’s contemporaries likely would’ve killed to have in their own catalogs.
Welcome Interstate Managers is, simply put, a masterful example of making music that sounds frivolous but feels utterly consequential.
The attention Fountains of Wayne received in the wake of Welcome Interstate Managers would swiftly recede, although the acclaim from critics never did. The band released a follow-up in 2007, Traffic and Weather, and one more studio album, Sky Full of Holes, in 2011 before calling it a day, owing in part to Collingwood and Schlesinger’s increasingly contentious relationship.
Schlesinger’s death in 2020 briefly returned Fountains of Wayne to the cultural conversation — the surviving band members reunited to perform a livestreamed tribute just weeks after his passing — and served as a poignant reminder of the group’s enduring brilliance.
Fittingly, for a band that excelled at finding inspiration in contradictory flavors, the episode was yet another illustration of something sweet — a renewed appreciation for the extraordinary artistry of an under-heralded act emerging from something harsh.
