Songwriter in slyly literary pop band won acclaim for TV and film music
Adam Schlesinger, who has died from Covid-19 complications aged 52, was part of the slyly intellectual rock band Fountains of Wayne, whose musical expertise led to behind-the-scenes songwriting work in film and television.
Named after a lawn-ornament store in Schlesinger’s native northern New Jersey, Fountains of Wayne crashed the pop charts in 2003 with Stacy’s Mom, a note-perfect New Wave pastiche narrated by a hormone-sozzled high-school boy infatuated with his classmate’s mother.
Accompanied by a music video featuring a bikini-clad Rachel Hunter in the title role,
Stacy’s Mom,
from the group’s third album, led to Grammy nominations for pop duo/group performance and best new artist.
Schlesinger, who wrote the group’s songs with bandmate Chris Collingwood, brought a literary flair to funny but empathetic portraits of suburban lives, as in Hey Julie (‘‘Working all day for a mean little man with a clip-on tie and a rub-on tan’’) and Leave the Biker, about a wimpy guy daydreaming of wooing a woman away from her muscled boyfriend with ‘‘crumbs in his beard from the seafood special’’.
Musically, the duo was no less detailed in its approach to the hooks and arrangements in Fountains of Wayne’s tunes, which could echo everything from 60s folk-pop to 70s country to 80s hair metal. Though they emerged during the alternative-rock boom triggered by Nirvana’s success in the early 90s, they belonged to an older lineage of storytellers such as Randy Newman and the Kinks, who were an avowed influence.
‘‘When we were teenagers, we liked listening to Kinks records because we’d never been to England, and we got a sense of what it was like to live there,’’ Schlesinger told the
New York Times in 1999 _ something that could easily be said of the freeways and strip malls of Fountains of Wayne’s 1999 album
Utopia Parkway.
Schlesinger was also a member of Ivy, a more urbane New York City trio that specialised in sleek, lightly electronic pop. In 2009 he formed a short-lived arena-rock supergroup called Tinted Windows with Smashing Pumpkins’ James Iha, Hanson’s Taylor Hanson and Bun E Carlos of Cheap Trick.
Schlesinger’s ease with various genres made him a natural fit for writing music for movies and TV; indeed, much of his work in Hollywood came in films and shows about musicians. In 1997 he was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for the peppy title song from That Thing You Do!,
director Tom Hanks’ loving tribute to the onehit wonders of post-Beatles rock’n’roll.
He wrote tunes for 2001’s live-action reboot of Josie and the Pussycats and for Music and
Lyrics, a 2007 romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore as two songwriters who fall in love while collaborating. His other credits include music for Crank Yankers, Sesame Street, and Stephen Colbert’s 2008 Christmas special, for which he was nominated for an Emmy and won a Grammy. In 2008 he also hit Broadway with his songs for Cry-Baby, a musical adaptation of the 1990 John Waters movie.
More recently he wrote songs for the critically acclaimed TV comedy drama series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Among them was We Tapped That Ass, a delightfully profane number that earned an Emmy nod in 2017.
Adam Lyons Schlesinger was born and grew up in New Jersey, the grandson of a theatre impresario, the late Murray Bernthal, who brought opera stars and touring Broadway shows to audiences in Syracuse, New York. He attended Williams College in Massachusetts, where he and Collingwood met and began playing music. After graduation, they moved to New York and, as Schlesinger told New York magazine in 2011, honed their songwriting chops by challenging each other to create songs from titles they’d write down on bar napkins.
The two recruited a guitarist, Jody Porter, and a drummer, Brian Young, to join them for live shows after they had signed to Atlantic Records and recorded their 1996 debut album Fountains of Wayne; that lineup remained intact for the remainder of the band’s career.
Schlesinger said he and Collingwood spent only about US$5000 to record the first album. But the crisp, vivid sound he got as the album’s producer made him a popular choice for other acts looking for someone to oversee their work in the studio; Schlesinger went on to produce records by Dashboard Confessional, Motion City Soundtrack, America and the Monkees, among others.
He is survived by his wife, Katherine Michel, and their two daughters, Sadie and Claire. – Los Angeles Times