Sublime hooks, a tasteful amount of grit and a chorus that seems to reach the heavens – it’s ‘90s alt-rock at its absolute finest.
Passages like “I’ve been hiding all my hopes and dreams away/Just in case I ever need ’em again someday/I’ve been setting aside time/To clear a little space in the corners of my mind” feel just broad enough to be part of a Top 40 hit, but also wistful and smart enough to justify the talk of Barrymore’s unpolished gifts.
Want more Rolling Stone? Like on many of his “high school” songs, Schlesinger’s lyrics find the sweet spot between adolescence and adulthood: The first verse warns of underage drinking, reckless driving, and skinny-dipping, while the more innocuous second verse dreams of playing music too loud and “Jumping on the couch/’Til the feathers all come out.” D.K.
“There would be no Playtone without Adam Schlesinger, without his That Thing You Do!” Tom Hanks wrote. Answering everyone will take a long time.
He also teamed with Smashing Pumpkins’ James Iha, Hanson’s Taylor Hanson, and Cheap Trick’s Bun E. Carlos to form the supergroup Tinted Windows, which released a self-titled LP in 2009. Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger Dead at 52 From Coronavirus Musician composed extensively for film and TV, including That Thing You Do! She wore Van Halen T-shirts, rocked heart-shaped sunglasses, and liked to hang around by the po-oo-ol. (“Will you stop pretending I’ve never been born?/Now I look a little more like that guy from Korn?”) Like most of their tales of the lovelorn, things don’t seem destined to end well for our hero — he concludes the song by again asking, “I’m fit to be dyed, am I fit to have you?” — but it’s an absolute jam for the listener. The songs he wrote for Hugh Grant’s washed-up pop star are excellent but his best song almost flies under the radar, playing over the closing credits and not even appearing on the official soundtrack. Wonderful, a kid who mows her lawn while her mother gets a massage he can’t stop staring at. and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend The result is a slow-mo ballad full of literary detail and Seventies-AM-radio fairy dust — and one of the sweetest love songs in all of alt-rock. He wrote original songs for the 2001 remake of Josie and the Pussycats and the 2007 Drew Barrymore/Hugh Grant rom-com Music and Lyrics; he wrote eight songs for Stephen Colbert’s 2008 Colbert Report holiday special, A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!.
Their lavish, cosmopolitan sound placed them at the front of indie-pop style alongside sophisticates like Stereolab, Luna, Black Box Recorder, and St. Etienne, with Durand’s languid Parisian accent giving Schlesinger and Chase’s shimmering songs an enviable air of continental refinement. Most songwriters would cling onto a pop nugget like ‘That Thing You Do’ rather than give it away to a film soundtrack. It comes to define you, but you have to find a way to stay fresh with it and enthusiastic about it.
Truly a devastating loss.”, Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger: 20 Essential Songs.
Music and Lyrics, “Way Back Into Love” (2007). S.V.L.
His trademark? (“Ping Pong Girl” sounds like the kind of pop-punk tune Schlesinger would have written for the Click Five alongside “Just the Girl,” while “The Very First Penis I Saw” is the best song Abba never performed, but should have.) Schlesinger and Javerbaum (who operates the popular @TheTweetOfGod account on Twitter) also collaborated on a musical based on John Waters’ Cry-Baby and, later, Neil Patrick Harris’ Emmy-winning Tony Awards opener “Not Just for Gays Anymore.” D.K.
(It somehow feels like part of the song’s punchline that Katy Perry mysteriously recorded a weirdly faithful cover of it when she did the revived MTV Unplugged in 2009.)
Adam Schlesinger, co-founder of the New Jersey power-pop group Fountains of Wayne and Emmy- and Grammy-winning songwriter for film, television, and theater, died Wednesday from complications related to COVID-19. J.D. If you only know one Fountains of Wayne song, chances are it’s ‘Stacy’s Mom’, the goofiest and catchiest of all their singles and the closest they came to a bonafide hit (Number 21 in the US, Number 11 in the UK).
Almost 15 years later, Schlesinger and Iha reunited to form the unlikely supergroup Tinted Windows with former Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos and, on lead vocals, Hanson’s Taylor Hanson.
“Richie and Ruben” is the wryly comic tale of two hustling entrepreneurs with way more moxie than good sense. So he turns it into a killer hook: “M-M-M-M-M-Maureen!” C.H. My thoughts are with Adam’s children and his parents, who treated me as one of their own.”, Seven years later, Schlesinger and Fountains of Wayne would notch their own career-defining hit, “Stacy’s Mom.”, In a 2016 interview with Consequence of Sound, Schlesinger spoke about the parallels between his fictional hit and his real life one: “People all of a sudden know you for this one song,” he said.
“He is irreplaceable.” “Devastated,” added Nanny star Fran Drescher. Like the title track from That Thing You Do!, this ballad has to hold up under repeated performances within the compact running time of the Hugh Grant–Drew Barrymore rom-com Music and Lyrics, where he plays the washed-up half of a Wham!-esque Eighties duo, while she’s his unlikely collaborator on a new song for a contemporary pop star.
Along the way, our hero encounters a numbing array of sights and sounds, enumerated with the kind of pop-cultural specificity this band values: Rest-stop shops selling Barney DVDs and “Virginia is For Lovers” tees, an old guy driving a van, a “kick drum mixed with static” from a fading radio station.
Here are 20 reasons why we loved Schlesinger, drawn from the many songs he wrote, sang, produced, or performed on. ), Here at Rolling Stone, we’re mourning this tragic loss. S.V.L. For most of his stint in Fountains of Wayne, Schlesinger was also regularly recording and touring with his other group, Ivy, which released six LPs between 1996 and 2011. (For a mix of spoof parody and pathos in equal measure, try “A Diagnosis,” “You Stupid Bitch,” or “It Was a Shit Show.”) But it’s also a hilarious, note-perfect riff on Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, with Bloom as a breathy air-head trying to use math metaphors to solve a romantic dilemma, much to the dismay of her would-be geometry teachers: “This triangle’s scalene”/“That’s astute”/“So I need to decide which man’s more acute!” A.S. Schlesinger gives this aimless bro’s story real heart, making you root for him to win even though you know he never will.
The lyrics tell the story of a woman coming up to the Fire Island/Cape Cod-type vacation house her family has been going to since she was a kid, with images flashing from her bored, depressed middle-aged perspective to memories of spoiled misadventures from her equally bored, though perhaps somewhat less depressed, Seventies childhood (the time she got busted shoplifting, the time she went to the hospital after taking mushrooms, etc.). © 2020 NME is a member of the media division of BandLab Technologies. But none of those bands would ever have written about this specific Tri-State loser, lamenting his lameness in perfect pop couplets forever.
Peace.”, Schlesinger earned a Tony nomination for co-writing the score for the 2008 Broadway musical Cry-Baby, based on the John Waters film of the same name and received back-to-back Emmys in 2012 and 2013 for original songs he wrote for the Tonys, “It’s Not Just for Gays Anymore” and “If I Had Time.” He allso served as a composer and executive music producer for the CW’s hit musical series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, ultimately earning his third Emmy for the Season Four song, “Anti-Depressants are So Not a Big Deal.”.