missy

Fountains of Wayne give to the new millennium what Cheap Trick gave to the '70s: meticulously crafted power-pop songs with mountainous hooks, delivered with equal doses of absurdity and absolute sincerity. Like a well-written children's story, their songs can be appreciated on multiple levels. For example, the cheery melody of "Bright Future In Sales" off their new album Welcome Interstate Managers belies its story of a down-on-his-luck salesman, struggling to come to grips with his life and new technology. I've loved their music since high school, and so I felt slightly nervous when I sat down to talk with their co-founder Adam Schlesinger:

Keith Daniels: Every time I listen to a Fountains of Wayne record I end up thinking "Wow. I never expected to hear that phrase as the chorus of a song." Do you intentionally try to come up with lyrics that are novel?

Adam Schlesinger: [laughs] That's funny. I don't know if it's really a conscious process to come up with something novel, but we certainly don't want to write generic songs with generic lyrics. I guess when we first started the band, there was a certain element of coming up with strange or striking phrases and seeing if we could actually make them into a listenable song, and part of that has stuck with us. It's really hard to articulate where ideas for songs come from. Usually I just start free associating things that stick in my head for some reason, and it starts to turn into some kind of story.

KD: Have you ever tried to go back and see where you got a certain idea? Like "Oh yeah, I saw something in a newspaper six months ago..."

AS: There have been certain cases of that. More often there's a phrase that comes from somewhere, just hanging around for a while in the back of one of our heads we keep thinking we're going to try and turn into a song at some point. Like "Halley's Waitress", that was just sortof an inside joke. Every time we went into a restaurant with really bad service... it turned into a song idea.

KD: Every time I've read an interview with you, when they inevitably mention how good your songs are, you always sound surprised. It reminds me of my theory that you shouldn't date anyone who knows how good-looking they are.

AS: [laughs] That certainly wouldn't be a problem with me. Y'know... when we put out our first record we honestly thought that were just gonna get panned, because we thought everybody was going to think we were just a bunch of wise-asses. We were pleasantly surprised to see that people took it in the right spirit, but you can't sit around trying to write "great songs" or trying to make some kind of high art. You just have to make something that entertains yourself, and hopefully some of that spirit of having fun while you're making it translates into someone else having fun while they're listening to it.

KD: Is it still as much fun for you now as it was before the first Fountains of Wayne record came out?

AS: I think we're having a lot of fun now, and that's partially because we took a long break. I think after each album cycle we really need to recharge our batteries and get away from it for a while, because when you're touring for months on end it does start feeling like a job. The grind of traveling and all that starts to wear on you. You need to go back to civilian life and then get re-energized.

KD: Your songs often sound on the first listen like happy songs, but if you look at them deeper there's often an element of sadness.

AS: Yeah, I think that's important in order to keep it interesting. Something that's just relentlessly cheery in every way doesn't wear very well.

KD: Did that come from any of your songwriting heroes?

AS: I suppose. Definitely some of my favorites have always been able to have that contrast between what the music sounds like and what it's actually saying. Randy Newman, for example, writes these really dark character portraits, but uses this jazzy, ragtime-y style to put them across. Somehow that always seemed to work. Neil Finn is the same thing. He's a really poppy writer in terms of melodies, but his lyrics tend to be really ambiguous. For some reason that's interesting. I don't know why.

KD: What do you think about some of the music that's coming out nowadays?

AS: I actually think there's been a fair amount of good music coming out in the last year or two. It seems like maybe it has something to do with the economy going to shit, or the general mood of the country being down, but that always seems to make for a period of better music.

KD: Why do you think that is?

AS: I have no idea. I guess things are cyclical in general, and maybe after going through a period of being bombarded by so much super-corporate over-processed stuff people's ears start craving something a little more real sounding, or different-sounding.

KD: The first song on the new album is called "Mexican Wine". Is there a good story behind that? Did you actually get a hold of some Mexican wine?

AS: That was one of the ones that was written stream-of-consciousness style, just kind of free-associating a bunch of images. Sometimes songs end up having their own internal logic that you don't even get while you're putting it together. It just starts to make sense on its own. I was actually trying, with that song, to intentionally not write the kind of linear story that I normally write. When we started the band, the typical difference between my songs and Chris's songs was that my songs were very linear, and narrative: A happens, then B happens, and then C happens. His songs were much more free-associative, and I think that after a while we both tried to imitate each other a little bit.

KD: ...And that happens automatically if you're around another person for a long period of time.

AS: Yeah. I think that's why we work well together. I think we both had different skills as writers, and we both influenced each other. Maybe in some way we both try to write to impress the other one.

KD: You've worked with They Might Be Giants recently. Did you learn anything from them?

AS: Oh, definitely. We've been fans of theirs since we were in college, and I think they've continued to set a great example on how you can have a career doing your own strange thing. They take what they do very seriously, but at the same time they have a great sense of humor-they still have fun with it. They still manage to keep it vital and changing.

KD: You're involved in a lot of side projects outside of Fountains of Wayne, Ivy, for example. Do you do a lot of these things because you have to keep busy-have to have an outlet?

AS: I like to keep busy. I really don't consider Ivy to be a side-project. Ivy's sortof it's own thing that's been going for as long as Fountains of Wayne has, and somehow the two things have managed to peacefully coexist. Some of the stuff I'm involved with is more like "work"-which is not to say that I don't enjoy it, but when I produce records for other people, part of that is that I enjoy doing that as a creative break from my own thing, and part of it is that it's sortof more a job where you can make a little money and still be involved with music.

KD: One of the songs that struck me on Welcome Interstate Managers is a song called "Peace and Love", and I was thinking that it was probably totally serious as far as what's going on in the world.

AS: It is serious. Again, it's intended to be sortof ambiguous. On the one hand, I think it's supposed to be kindof funny, and just kindof the musings of some stoned guy. On the other hand, I think the sentiment behind it is real-it's not meant to be sarcastic.

KD: What were your thoughts about the war? What are your thoughts on where American foreign policy is heading at the moment?

AS: Well, I certainly don't consider myself a political analyst, but it seems amazing to me that from September 11th till now we've managed to take incredible world sympathy and turn it into incredible world antipathy in such a short period of time. It's like we squandered a lot of the good will that we had in the rest of the world.

KD: I've read that after your shows you seem to get a lot of the older record-geek guys-and it always seems to be male, that certain type of pop geek-are you ever thinking "Where are the girls?"

AS: The girls show up if you get a little radio play or a little MTV play. [laughs] They don't seem to read music magazines quite as obsessively as the guys.

KD: Why does it seem to be such a male thing?

AS: It's that weird High Fidelity thing, y'know? It's just a personality type. I don't know why that is, but it's for real.

KD: Do you identify with that type of guy? I mean, if you weren't in a band would you be that guy?

AS: Well, I suppose I am that type of guy in the sense that I own thousands and thousands of records. So I probably know way too much about that kind of stuff than I need to, probably takes up a lot of room in my brain that could be used for better purposes, but it's been like that since I was a kid. I can't really help it.

KD: So what was it that got you into music on a deeper level?

AS: It was just something that I was always interested in. I started playing piano when I was a little kid, and I was into the Beatles when I was in grade school. I just don't remember a time when I wasn't interested in music. I remember being surprised when I got a bit older and found out that everybody wasn't like that.

KD: Something else that I keep coming across is this question of "Why aren't you guys the biggest band in the world?" "Why wasn't 'Troubled Times' a huge hit?"

AS: We really don't think about that kind of thing too much in our day-to-day lives anymore. Maybe when we were 21 we had more of a burning ambition to conquer the world, but at this point, honestly, I think we're happier that we've found our own niche, and that we do something that we're proud of. Just the fact that we have an audience that we can play to wherever we wanna go... that was really the most ambition we ever had, y'know? [laughs] To be able to travel halfway around the world and have a bunch of people show up and fill a club, that's awesome, and it's still awesome to us. [Publicist cuts in, saying our time is almost up.] Hey, do I get a free membership to Suicidegirls?

Fountains of Wayne make for an awkward URL at Fountains of Wayne.com