Power pop is the cruelest genre, mixing memory and desire. It promises so much—sparkling hooks, winsome harmonies, echoes of the songs we loved first and love best—yet so rarely delivers. Turns out hooks are a dime a dozen, harmonies can be bought off the rack, and anyone can borrow that extra chord from a Beatles or Bacharach song to seem fresh and smart. How often have you found a song or bought an album, attracted by the shiny, glittering sound, only to feel duped?
I never felt duped by the Fountains of Wayne. Each of their songs fulfilled the potential implicit in its riffs, fuzz, and twang. Sure, there was the encyclopedic knowledge of pop past, deployed with a machinelike precision that Robbie Fulks so aptly and amiably targeted in “Fountains of Wayne Hotline.” (Only a master of the craft could fashion so shrewd a tribute to the superior craftsmanship of fellow masters.) But what makes FOW songs more than mere aural pastiche are the wit, the words, the stories, and the personalities that populate them. This is real writing, with the precision and color of the best fiction and real compassion for the characters that inhabit the songs. According to this bit of essential reading, it was Adam Schlesinger who brought that quality to the group. With Chris Collingwood, he charted the dreams and disappointments of the Millennials of the Tri-state area (and beyond) just as John Cheever had for an earlier generation. And like Cheever, he revealed a heretofore unrecognized beauty and sense of wonder in that often bleak terrain.
Of course I like the clever songs, but the ones that stick with me are those that go deeper. I’m thinking especially of “All Kinds of Time” (below), a song that achieves a clarity and compression that popular art so often claims but hardly ever owns, one that—dare I say it?—is kind of profound without straining for it. Like all the works closest to my heart, this one inspires gratitude for the generosity of its creators: generosity in marshaling their gifts to such effect, in cramming their songs so full of smarts and care that the pleasure seems inexhaustible, in sharing a vision of the world that seems increasingly necessary.
Perhaps generosity was Schlesinger’s true gift. It certainly served him well as a prolific collaborator, not just with Collingwood but with side groups like cosmopolitan Ivy (which I may have listened to as much as I have FOW) and with other musicians for movies, the stage, and television. Hours of joy await anyone exploring the songs he helped write for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, where Schlesinger moved beyond the FOW playground of 1960s and 1970s Top 40 to tweak everything from klezmer to Justin Bieber—while still leaving room for the most lovely, funny, and knowing Beach Boys parody we are likely to be graced with.
Now as we mourn the too-soon death of Schlesinger, there is also the awful sense that the world—and many of the people—he so lovingly described are gone forever. Yes, that world is preserved in the amber of his songs, but we have world making and remaking ahead of us, and Adam Schlesinger’s voice will be keenly missed in that work. His example will have to suffice.
– Tom Fredrickson
My editor asked me to write an Adam Schlesinger playlist with twelve songs. I sent her thirty, and she published them all. https://t.co/pXBitN0kCD
— Rob Tannenbaum (@tannenbaumr) April 2, 2020
The musician Adam Schlesinger, who died this week, was a modest man of immodestly lavish talent, with a body of work that stands next to those of far bigger boldface names. https://t.co/qiqT5okF1G
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) April 3, 2020
