Fountains of Wayne

Fountains of Wayne

Pop rock band

For the Record…

Selected discography

Sources

Named for a garden shop in Wayne, New Jersey, Fountains of Wayne was formed in December of 1995 by Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood. The pair met in 1985 while they both attended Williams College, supposedly over learning chord progressions to an R.E.M. song. The duo is noted for its songwriting talents, and has been compared to numerous solid pop songwriting teams: John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Squeeze’s Chris Difford and Glen Tillbrook, Alex Chilton and Chris Bell of Big Star and Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding of XTC.

During college the pair played in several improbably named bands including Wooly Mammoth, Are You My Mother?, and Three Men When Stood Side By Side Have A Wingspan Of Over 12 Feet. Shortly after graduation, they signed a record deal as the Wallflowers, a band name under which they never recorded and eventually sold to Jakob Dylan and crew. After college, Schlesinger moved to New York to concentrate on working with the band Ivy, a group that he continued to perform with even after starting Fountains of Wayne. Collingwood and Schlesinger continued to play together infrequently as Pinwheel.

Prior to forming Fountains of Wayne, Schlesinger wrote music for television shows including House of Buggirn ’ and the short-lived The Dana Carvey Show, while Collingwood worked in a bank and played country music with Mercy Buckets in Boston. It was when he moved to New York that the pair began discussing a few songs that Collingwood had written. “We decided to get together and crank out a bunch more, and record them before we had time to think about it too much,” Schlesinger told Rolling Stone.

The pair was together for a week when they recorded theirdebut album Fountains Of Wayne’m 1996. Schlesinger played drums, bass guitar and keyboards, and produced the recording as well. Collingwood served as the group’s guitarist and vocalist. “Radiation Vibe” hit number 14 on the Billboard Modem Rock Tracks in 1997. Billboard called the group’s sound a “light-hearted, hook-heavy take on classic pop-rock verities.” Fountains Of Wayne tied for second place in the magazine’s 1996 Critics’ Poll. When the time came to take Fountains of Wayne on the road, the pair hired Belltower guitarist Jody Porter, and former Posies drummer Brian Young to round out the band. The group opened for acts including Smashing Pumpkins and Lemonheads.

Fountains of Wayne was released at the same time as the soundtrack for the Tom Hanks film That Thing You Do! Schlesinger had been hired to write a song in the Beatles “Merseybeat” tradition for the film. The song “That Thing You Do” earned Schlesinger a Grammy nomination for Best Original Song. He was in the company of no less than Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice as well as that of Grammy favorite Diane Warren.

Schlesinger told Raygun that both he and Collingwood are songwriting traditionalists. “Chris and I both write on acoustic guitars and piano, and that forces you to think about melody and lyrics. You can’t rely on the drum track or the sound of the sample you pick to keep it interesting.” In a Rolling Stone Network interview Schlesinger said, “We come from a point of view where you write melodies and lyrics, not just make a lot of noise or guitar riffs. We definitely come from more of a traditional songwriting place, you know, Beatles, ’60s stuff, Zombies, Hollies, Beach Boys.”

Collingwood lists Prefab Sprout and Aztec Camera as his influences, along with other early 1980s British bands like The Smiths and Everything But the Girl. “I don’t really listen to anything but pop songs,” Collingwood told Billboards Bradley Bab in 1997. “I’ve never liked anything that wasn’t easily hummable right off. That sort of immediacy makes for an effective form of communication. In the right three minutes, you can get a real portrait of an emotion.”

The group followed up with Utopia Parkway’m 1999. “On Utopia Parkway, Fountains of Wayne create a pop

For the Record…

Members include Chris Collingwood , guitars and vocals; Jody Porter , guitar; Adam Schlesinger , (born in NJ; mother: publicist, father: horticulturist; both amateur musicians); bass and miscellaneous instruments; Brian Young , drums.

Group formed 1996 by Collingwood and Schlesinger as a duo; pair met while attending Williams College; played together in other bands prior to forming Fountains of Wayne; released Fountains of Wayne, Scratchie/TAG/Atlantic, 1996.; added Porter and Young in order to tour in support of album; recorded Utopia Parkway, 1999.

Addresses: Record company —Atlantic Records, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104.

masterpiece that makes them to ’90s suburbia what the Kinks were to working class mores during the swinging ’60s,” wrote Detour critic Matt Diehl. An anonymous Mademoiselle critic gushed that “Their super simple, blatantly suburban, just-post-teenage tunes about crushing, cruising, lazing and loving have a head-boppy, deliberate rincky-dink quality: cheap and cheesy guitars, light and breezy harmonies, twinkly, New Wave-ish keyboards… The feeling and imagery are so much fun, even the sad songs will make you smile.”

Critics have noted similarities in the group’s sound to a wide number of other successful pop acts from Beatles and Beach Boys to Cheap Trick and Marshall Crenshaw. “I’m much more comfortable being lumped in with Cheap Trick,” Collingwood quipped. He told Musician that Utopia Parkway is filled with songs containing “absolutely none of ourselves and a lot of everybody else.” And critics have made their own speculation about the group’s pop inspirations, citing a diverse lot of artists including Billy Joel and The Romantics.

Collingwood told Billboard that Utopia Parkway is the band’s chance to explore the depth of its abilities. “Typically, the first album is sort of a statement of purpose, to put it in ridiculous business terms,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Here’s what we are; here’s what we do.’ If you try to make it too complicated and too weird, it tends to muddle the vision. But once you’ve established that, I think it’s a natural progression to do something a little more diverse.”

The plaudits and songwriting team comparisons continued as “Denise” began airing on modern rock and college radio stations in the summer of 1999. However, Schlesinger contends, “College radio stations don’t particularly care about our record,” he told Time Out New York. “We went straight to commercial radio with our first single.”

The duo wanted to be known as songwriters rather than performers. Collingwood told CMJ New Music Monthly that Fountains of Wayne is “really more about having a forum for two songwriters that it is about four guys working on songs together.” He told TimeOut New York, “I’ve never wanted to be known as a singer or a guitar player. I want to be known as a songwriter.”

The art of songwriting is more difficult than it might seem according to Schlesinger. “If you sit around trying to write the perfect pop song, you really won’t write anything,” Schlesinger told Pulse! “I mean, we started just trying to write things that would entertain each other, more than trying to reach some kind of lofty goal with the songs. And I think sometimes that’s what people respond to more than anything in a song—that even though you’re using a kind of classic form, there’s some little private joke or personal reference in it that keeps it from being a generic exercise.”

Selected discography

Fountains of Wayne, Scratchie/TAG/Atlantic, 1996.

Utopia Parkway, Atlantic, 1999.

Sources

Alternative Press, June 1999.

Billboard, January 18, 1997; March 20, 1999.

CMJ New Music Monthly, May 1999.

Detour, April 1999.

Mademoiselle, April 1999.

Musician, January 1999.

New York Times, May 31, 1999.

People, March 3, 1997; March 17, 1997.

Pulse!, May 1999.

Raygun, May 1999.

Rolling Stone, November 28, 1996.

TimeOut New York, April 8, 1999.

Additional information provided by Atlantic Records publicity materials.

—Linda Dailey Paulson