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The Fountains of Wayne cofounder and “That Thing You Do! ” songwriter died Wednesday of complications from the coronavirus
“All Kinds of Time, ” one of the seemingly hundreds of objectively perfect psalms written or cowritten by Adam Schlesinger, is the best and rarest sort of rock’ n’ roll alchemy: It somehow alters its titular cheeseball football-announcer cliche into a crushingly beautiful performance of boyish greatnes, and in so doing achieves a sort of immortality itself. Rarest is underselling it, really: No method any other songwriter in history has ever was also able to do that specific thing before. Schlesinger died Wednesday, at 52, of complications from the coronavirus. This is the first song of his to put on repeat for hours.
It is a power ballad; it begins with piteous acoustic guitar and slowly picks sonic and narrative impetu from there. It is available on 2003 ’s Welcome Interstate Managers, the third album from New York City power-pop savants Fountains of Wayne, a jocular quadruplet led by Schlesinger and his cowriter and lead singer, Chris Collingwood. It is tremendously clever but securely not a descend joke. “All Kinds of Time” is, after all, about exactly what the claim cliche would suggest it’s about: “The young quarterback/ Waits for the snarl/ When abruptly it all starts to make sense, ” Collingwood warbles, as if this is the most profound and beautiful portrait in the world, and of course unexpectedly it is. The final poem travels like this:
He watches to the leftHe gazes to the rightAnd there in a golden ray of lightIs his open manJust like he plannedThe whole world is his tonight
The song and the pass both hang in the air, swooning and pregnant, and then, spurt: a first-kiss-on-a-junior-high-dance-floor blowup of electrical arena-rock ecstasy. Perfect.
“For better or worse, my psalms aren’t frequently that abstract, ” Schlesinger wrote in The New York Times in 2013. “Maybe it’s because I never did enough medications. But I tend to write chants that are about something quite specific.” As for this song precisely 😛 TAGEND
It was admittedly sort of a hokey intuition on paper, but I retained a wistful Paul Simon baseball song announced “Night Game, ” which is not really about plays at all, and I strive for a bit of that feeling. I worked on the texts to my mind firstly, and then tried to set it to music that show slow motion. When the NFL later licensed this song for a blot featuring classic slow-motion footage of quarterbacks, I could not have been happier, because I was almost like that idea must have come across.
On Fountains of Wayne records, the relevant recommendations always came across , no matter how outlandish, or silly, or crushingly earnest, or preferably all of the above. Their self-titled 1996 entry, which knocks off with the instant-classic crunchy earworm “Radiation Vibe, ” emerged into an alt-rock era that could treat gravely with chaps who tried to be too smart, extremely funny, extremely flagrantly suburban, too supportive to the losers “of the worlds”. “He’s got his arm around every man’s dream, ” exits the chorus to a goofy raver called “Leave the Biker, ” the guitar twisting as pristine as the specific characteristics. “Crumbs in his whisker from the Seafood Special.” The catchiest song on the album might be the one called “Please Don’t Rock Me Tonight.”
Speaking of flagrantly suburban, the road on 1999 ’s Utopia Parkway I am most fond of is the gentle piano ditty “Prom Theme, ” which as usual is exactly what it says it is, and whose final poem is a triumph of a different kind 😛 TAGEND
Here we are at lastWe’re running out of gasThe air is getting thickThe girlfriends are feeling sickWe’ll pass out on the beachOur keys just out of reachAnd soon we’ll say goodbyeThen we’ll work until we die
This is all pretty close to objectively exhilarating, but the song also takes its characters’ misses and needs and exultations and stings dangerously: A Schlesinger production tends to get better the deeper it excavates, the more banal its items first appear to be. The glory of “All Kind of Time” would perfectly reign even the greatest album by a lesser band, but Welcome Interstate Managers also has Fountains of Wayne’s biggest and horniest affect, “Stacy’s Mom, ” which sounds like 12 of your personal favorite Cars chorus resounding simultaneously, and is followed immediately by the band’s saddest-ever song, “Hackensack, ” a bruisingly detail-packed study of a lovelorn loser yearning for a beautiful classmate who fled Hackensack for Hollywood stardom and will never be getting back. You are likely think of a few rock’ n’ roll huges who’ve specialized in evoking both the agony and the ecstasy of New Jersey. Schlesinger stands among other issues.
Dip anywhere into the band’s catalog( their final book was 2011 ’s extra-wistful Sky Full of Holes) and you’ll plunge into a master-songwriter rabbit hole. Just now I was listening to “Someone to Love, ” the leadoff track to their 2007 book Traffic and Weather, a thorny but of course relentlessly hooky New Wave jam about two friendles Brooklynites–Seth Shapiro and Beth McKenzie, because courages in Fountains of Wayne anthems often get full words and ever get Tolstoyan backstories–destined to meet cute and fall for each other. And midway through the not-quite-four-minute song, I came so invested in that story line I Googled the lyrics because I wanted to see how it objective. Schlesinger specialized in hymns dense and unforgettable enough that they were worth bungle.
Or maybe you are aware him for the anthems he wrote for those movies you enjoy, lyrics so central to the narrative and the drama and the credibility that those movies literally would not exist otherwise. He wrote the exquisite ’6 0s one-hit-wonder jam that committed Tom Hanks’s 1996 directorial introduction That Thing You Do! its name; for the 2007 Drew Barrymore-Hugh Grant romcom Music and& Lyrics, he wrote the tender ballad “Way Back Into Love” o’er which that woo, and much of the movie’s plot, percolates. Now he is onstage, singing one of the anthems he wrote for the 2001 remaking of Josie and the Pussycat.
Outside of Fountains of Wayne, in the ’9 0s Schlesinger cofounded the swankier and stormier daddy strip Ivy, and in 2009 he connected the hallucinating power-pop supergroup Tinted Windows alongside Smashing Pumpkins’ James Iha, Hanson’s Taylor Hanson, and Cheap Trick’s Bun E. Carlos, because why the hell not. More recently, he wrote or cowrote 157 songs for the extremely beloved CW comedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, of which my personal favorite is “I Gave You a UTI, ” though on the basis of the Schlesinger “egobituary” see cocreator Aline Brosh McKenna announced to Twitter Wednesday night, I am rapidly warming toward “What It’ll Be ?. ”
Which as you can see is another piano ballad, and the other melancholy tribute to a down-on-their-luck nobody who becomes, via Schlesinger’s careful and workmanlike but also completely mystical notice, a person.
I know this town like the back of my handBut I’m not such a fan of the back of my hand’Cause if you seem real close at those little fuzzs and veinsYou’re like, “Hands are sorta gross”It’s hard to explain
It is easy to explain what constitutes this ridiculous, but much harder to get at what also builds it transcendent. It’s simply another perfect song he wrote–one of obviously hundreds.
Read more: theringer.com
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