If, like me, you are a sucker for a good, original, well-executed novelty song, you could do a lot worse than "Fountains of Wayne Hotline" by Robbie Fulks. It's available on iTunes now and I'd say it's easily worth ninety-nine cents.
The premise and the song are one and the same, which is always a neat trick: Fulks and his band are in the middle of recording a track called "Fountains of Wayne Hotline" and are stuck on how to proceed, so they call the Fountains of Wayne Hotline for songwriting, arranging, and production advice. In the process, they manage not only a decent comedy routine but also a pretty good parody-replication of the Fountains of Wayne sound.
"Fountains of Wayne Hotline" originated as a travel game in our van. "Welcome Interstate Managers" had just come out, and I guess it was the band's super-competency and amazing consistency that made me imagine them as operators of a crisis hotline for songwriters. In our game one of us would place an emergency call for counseling, and a member of a large bureaucratic labyrinth, usually harried and gruff, would offer a solution based on time-honored Fountains of Wayne techniques. Grant, our guitarist, excelled at the mean-spirited drones, and occasionally a different kind of Hotline character would pop up, like one of the perky-beyond-all-reason types that were drummer Gerald's specialty. Just another of those things that turns grimly incomprehensible in the telling...but, for whatever reason, it was amusing enough that I codified it as a song a little while later.
Dr_Frank
Oakland, CA
May 2005
NOV 08, 2005 03:46 PM