Fountains of Wayne

I am always amazed at the number of people who can’t be bothered to listen to music. I’m also, for that matter, surprised at how few people can be bear to read anything, but reading takes some concentration and I had my enjoyment of reading so severely taxed in college that it was years before I remembered that I actually liked it and could pick up a book for fun again – so that seems a little more understandable. But, come on, how hard is it to listen to music? You can do it while you drive, while you eat, while you play cards, while you watch TV (I tend to use my TV as an aquarium or fireplace, just to have something moving to rest my eyes on while listening to music – that’s one of the reasons I like it to put sports on, I can follow what’s going on without having to hear it and it frees my aural processors up to listen to music). Listening to music makes almost any activity more enjoyable (except reading and fucking, of course – and I even know someone who used to like to listen to music while they practiced the viola, although I can’t imagine how (or why)).

The other thing that puzzles me about people who do listen to music is that there’s a surprising number who find one thing that they like and then they just stop. I know lots of people who discovered some sort of music in high school or college, usually associated with their first faltering steps out of the nest and into individuality and independence, and then won’t listen to anything else after that. I don’t understand that. Finding cool music made me want to find more cool music and it just keeps snowballing. But I guess that’s just me. After all, it does take some work to get used to new music. It’s easy to listen to something that you already know that you like and can sing along with, and lots of new music sounds weird at first and you have to keep plugging away at it until it begins to creep under your skin. G is like that. She’d rather listen to something that she knows than something that she doesn’t. I don’t let her get away with that and constantly bombard her with new stuff, which, of course, has the effect of turning a lot of new music into familiar music, so there’s more for her to choose from when she goes to pick out a disc for herself. I guess it’s like food for me. I’d often rather eat something that I know I like than try something that might suck, while other people are always looking for new food adventures.

Anyway.

Whenever I discover or am turned on to some amazing new musician, there’s a part of me that’s afraid that that’s going to be it, that I’ve found all the really cool music that I’m going to find and nobody’s ever going to affect me the same way again. Inevitably, the cool thing becomes old hat (familiar), and I wonder if I’ll ever catch on fire with somebody new again. After the Big Three (Yello, Art of Noise, and Fats Comet/Tackhead/et al) cooled off, there was a long dry spell before I stumbled across William Orbit and got all obsessive again. Then he became really popular (yawn) and his production slowed down and I started wondering if there was anything else amazing out there.

Then came Fountains of Wayne.

Fountains of Wayne was actually a simultaneous discovery for me and G. I was listening to the radio (KCRW) and heard this wonderfully catchy, wistful piece of perfect pop called Sick Day by some group with a ridiculous name (I don’t even flinch any more: Smashing Pumpkins, Nurse With Wound, Molasses Draftcard, whatever). I filed it away in the temporary holding bin in the back of my brain to see if it would disappear or get stick around (this is how I follow most leads, be it music or books or films or whatever – I put them in my mental RAM and see if they worm their way into ROM or if they get flushed). The next day, G told me about a great song she heard by some group named Wayne’s Fountain or something about a biker with food in his beard. Ding! Into ROM it went, and I went down to the local Tower Records and fished out their lone copy of Fountains of Wayne. I loved the cover (a boy dressed like Super Dork holding a rabbit hostage and flying to the rescue in some suburban backyard someplace). I bought it, brought it home, and put it on. By the time I finished playing it, I knew I had discovered the next big thing.

Fountains of Wayne is essential two guys, Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingswood, who were friends in college and kept in touch after graduation. One of them was in a signed band (Ivy), and the other – well, who knows what he was doing. One day one of them called the other and invited him over to hear some new songs he had written. And so began Fountains of Wayne (named after a garden supply and statuary store in Wayne, New Jersey, recently featured in The Sopranos).

For my money, Fountains of Wayne is the perfect pop band. Pop music (as in “popular”, of course – usually denoting that the music is catchy and doesn’t demand much from its listeners) has gone in and out of fashion over the years and is currently enjoying a moderate upswing in popularity. Sometimes, people feel that pop music is just too lightweight to be taken seriously and prefer to listen to something like King Crimson, notorious practitioners of “art rock” who’re always writing long songs with drastic chord clusters in hard-to-swallow time signatures. The danger with catchy music is that it often doesn’t have staying power – once you get over the initial hook, there’s nothing there to keep your interest. But that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. After all, The Beatles was one of the best pop bands ever (and one of the best art rock bands too) and their music has definitely stood the test of time. Fountains of Wayne’s music is frequently maddeningly catchy too, but there’s enough substance under the shiny surface to keep my interest.

The reason I say they are the perfect pop band is because they seem to encapsulate practically the entire history of pop music in their songs. You can tell by listening that they’re rabid music fans and have completely internalized the lessons to be learned from the last forty years of popular (and, especially, pop) music. You can clearly hear everything from the Beatles to the Beach Boys to Cheap Trick to Billy Joel and Blue Oyster Cult and Simon and Garfunkel and so on through the entire pop catalog. They also unabashedly cover tunes by Electric Light Orchestra and Brittany Spears without so much as a smirk. In fact, one of the highlights of their live show is when they play their “hit”, Radiation Vibe. During the middle of the song, they go into a hysterical (and seemingly impromptu) medley of classic songs (I’ve heard them do the Greg Khin band, Tom Petty, ZZ Top and Kraftwerk, to name a few) before finishing up their song.

Too Cool for School, which does not appear on any of their albums, is a little-known song that showcases just how proficient these guys are at constructing perfect pop confections. They temper their musical clichés with just the right amount of variation to make truly memorable songs that are instantly hooky, but still have enough subtlety to keep you engaged for many listenings. The track starts with a discordant guitar slash, very reminiscent of the opening to the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, before reeling off the riff that drives the verses. The initial riff is played by the full band (being a band concerned with pop clichés, they stick to the fundamentals: guitar, bass, and drums , with the very occasional keyboard, used for little flourishes) before the first verse starts and the guitar drops out. The lyrics, as well as the music, are made up from recombining clichés, so they’re littered with such phrases as “one eye open and his ear to the ground”, “looking out for number one”, and the title of the song itself, “too cool for school”.

The first verse leads directly into the second verse (after a reprise of that Hard Day’s chord), and the skeletal band is joined again by the guitarist and his syncopated strums. The full band charges through the second verse and chorus, laying out the landscape, before digging into the third verse. This time, on the run-up to the chorus, they drag out one of the oldest pop clichés, the handclaps, in perfect surf syncopation (clap, clap-clap). Instead of launching into the chorus for a second time, however, they stretch out with a little solo section that includes serviceable guitar solo and a little surf organ noodling. Nothing particularly virtuosic, you get the sense they’re there because that’s what’s supposed to be there in a pop song. Then back to the chorus, but this time, they stretch out the last line twice as long as the first time, and then return to the opening riff, except this time without the bass. Then the bass kicks in for the final verse (a reprise of the first). The final recanting of the song’s title happens three times, with different chords underneath each ending, before it finally swirls down into one of those suspended jazz chords hipsters like to end their songs with. All in a tight little package well under the critical three-minute mark.

It is, if I daresay, the perfect pop song. Nothing original but done in an original way. Tired cliché with just enough variation to keep you off balance. Carefully constructed, it sounds like it was tossed off in ten minutes. Brilliant.

And they do this kind of thing all the time. In their breakthrough hit, Stacy’s Mom, they open with a direct homage (or perhaps “rip-off” is a more accurate term) of the wonderful opening to The Cars’ first hit, Just What I Needed. During the song, the chorus ends with the line “I’m in love with Stacy’s mom”. Usually, the “mom” falls on the downbeat of the next phrase (as it does at the very end of the song), but towards the end, they mix it up a little by holding the phrase back a bit and hitting the downbeat on “Stacy’s” instead. Just enough variation to keep your ears (and the guys in the band) interested.

Curiously, Stacy’s Mom comes from their third – and most popular – album, Welcome Interstate Managers. While that isn’t necessarily curious by itself, what is curious is that, largely on the strength of Stacy’s Mom, Fountains of Wayne was nominated for a Grammy for “best new group”. This after they had been together nearly ten years and their third album had been released. Just goes to show you how vital and cutting edge the Grammies are.

Fountains of Wayne also specializes in writing small songs about small people. Their catalog is filled with quiet portraits of stand-up comediennes and office temps and carpet salesmen with comb-overs worrying about their lawns (there’s an entire song (All Kinds of Time) on their third album which takes place in a college quarterback’s head as he looks for an open receiver). They can be very funny, but they’re also not afraid to write gorgeous songs filled with heartfelt emotions (my first exposure to them, as I said, is the transcendently beautiful Sick Day, which perfectly captures the grinding hopelessness of being an invisible and powerless peon in a large corporation and looking forward to the best thing one can hope for: a sick day).

In addition to all of their musical, emotional, and cultural chops, they also write great lyrics. The aforementioned Sick Day contains the wonderful “lead us not into Penn Station”. In fact, the first album barely makes it into the perfect category for me because the weakest song (Joe Rey) contains the amazing lines