In addition to being part of Fountains Of Wayne, Schlesinger was well-known for writing tracks of film and television, including That Thing You Do!, Music & Lyrics, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. (His death from complications of COVID-19 was one of the inspirations for collaborator Rachel Bloom’s recent Netflix special.) In the band, he shared songwriting duties with Collingwood. “Adam’s greatest skill was distilling a genre to its essence and recreating it flawlessly, something he understood about himself and said all the time,” Collingwood told Rolling Stone in 2020. “That kind of ability comes from being fluent in the language of pop music, from years of listening analytically and being able to play many different instruments. It wasn’t until after FOW that I realized some of my guitarist friends have no idea what their drummer or bass player is doing at any given moment. Adam could have played every instrument on every FOW song, and it seemed to me he carried around in his head some idealized version of each of his songs that nothing real could measure up to.”
Fountains Of Wayne formed in 1995 and released six albums over the course of 16 years. Their most famous track was 2003’s “Stacy’s Mom,” which was nominated for a Grammy Award. “We were always described as a band that would have had huge hits in an alternate universe. So it felt like we had entered an alternate universe for at least a few months,” Schlesinger reflected in an interview with The A.V. Club in 2007. “It was sort of a confluence of events and luck and timing and all that stuff. It did seem a bit fluky, and obviously, the song has a sort of novelty aspect. And the video was basically soft porn. You have all those elements, and I can’t say it was a vindication or anything, really, because I think most people in the world still don’t have any idea who sang ‘Stacy’s Mom.’ Everybody knows that song, but most people don’t know who we are. So it didn’t really change that much in terms of the day-to-day operations of our band.”
