Musician composed extensively for film and TV, including That Thing You Do! and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
RIP Adam Schlesinger 1967-2020
This one hurts. Musician Adam Schlesinger has died at 52 due to Coronavirus.
He was a singer, songwriter, and composer for film, TV, and theater, but his big claim to fame was his alt-rock power pop band Fountains of Wayne. I got into them after hearing their 1996 debut album. “Radiation Vibe” was one of the best songs of 1996, hands down! In 1997, I saw FOW at a free WFNX show at the Hatch Shell in Boston. The band’s 1999 album Utopia Parkway was a concept album about growing up bored in the Summer in a NJ or Long Island town. It took a few years for a follow up after some record label changes, but 2003′s Welcome Interstate Managers was their most successful album and yielded their biggest hit “Stacey’s Mom”, a Cars-esque rocker about a kid pining for a girl’s mom, but innocent enough to not seem creepy. That whole album was awesome. The band’s 2007 album Traffic and Weather had some great tunes as well. I saw them in the Summer of 2007 in a special show on a ship at South Street Seaport in NYC. Fantastic show! Then they had one last album in 2011, before breaking up in 2013.
One of the things that was cool about FOW was there were tons of references to NJ, where Schlesinger grew up in Montclair: FOW was named after a store in Wayne, NJ, references throughout their albums, and one of their best songs “Hackensack” about Hackensack, NJ (an area I got to know while attending FDU). But they also had a lot of ties to MA too: he and Chris Collingwood met while attending Williams College forming FOW and they recorded frequently at Q Division too.
Schlesinger also had several side projects including Ivy and the supergroup Tinted Windows. He worked with several artists including The Monkees and Robert Plant (no joke). He also scored several films, TV shows and broadway theater. The guy was almost an EGOT. He scored music for The Dana Carvey Show and TV Funhouse before he was even famous. He wrote the title song for Tom Hanks’ underrated 1960s one-hit wonder film That Thing You Do and was nominated for an Academy Award for it. I worked on the rom-com Music and Lyrics, which Schlesinger scored. I was thrilled to be working on a music-centric film that he was scoring because his music in a film was like a seal of approval that if nothing else, the music would be good.
The link above is the obit from Rolling Stone.
