The Crushingly Earnest Power Pop of Adam Schlesinger

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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.