It’s clear COVID-19 will mow us all 
down, spiritually if not literally, decimating every aspect of life.
The music world is already being cut down from every genre. I just saw Joe Diffie playing some agreeable country at my first visit to the Grand Old Opry in October; he’s dead of it at 61. Jazz patriarch Ellis Marsalis, such a giant in New Orleans and in raising a generation of jazz figures, died of complication at 85; jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli now, too, at 94. John Prine, 73, has been hospitalized with the virus; Jackson Browne, 71. tested positive.
The coronavirus targets the elderly, we hear, so it’s even more devastating and surprising when it starts to take the young. And in music, the death of Adam Schlesinger at only 52, was such a sad shock.
He was co-founder of Fountains of Wayne, a band that cut deeper than their breezy rock songs might indicate. “Stacy’s Mom” may have been their best known song, but the band’s music had yearning, a sense of place and expressed the ennui of a 20-something displacement specific to East Coasters driving around in their ’92 Suburus, in the midst of losing their dreams and jobs.
The song that came after “Stacy’s Mom” on “Welcome Interstate Managers” rarely fails to stop me in my tracks. “Hackensack” was the tuneful song about a high school crush that left New Jersey for some measure of fame (“I saw your talikin’ to Christopher Walken”) while he keeps the flame going: “If you ever get back to Hackensack, I’ll be here for you.”
His protagonists may have delusions of mid-level success (“Bright Future in Sales”), pine over DMV workers (“Yolanda Hayes”) and coffee slingers (“Halley’s Waitress”). And they do so with familiar place names (in “Laser Show,” “They come from Bridgeport, Westport, Darien / Down to the Hayden Planetarium”); in “Little Red Light,” “Sitting in traffic on the Tappan Zee”).
“Valley Winter Song” is my favorite Christmas song that’s not about Christmas (instead, snow falls in Northampton, Mass.) (though they did a neat Christmas single too, with, “I Want an Alien for Christmas”).
I read that Schlesinger used to joke that when famous people died, everyone else always posted something online about some minor encounter they may have had with that person. Here’s mine:
I spoke to him in 1997 over the phone. He was in Sioux Falls, S.D. talking about the first time he had played my state. It was the El ’N’ Gee club in New London, where Fountains of Wayne’s Connecticut debut just thee months earlier had attracted exactly zero customers.
On this wintery day, things were looking up – his band was opening the final leg of a tour for Smashing Pumpkins that was to play the New Haven Coliseum.
“It’s more fun playing these kinds of stages, I must say,” Schlesinger said. “It’s weirdly less intimidating than a small club. It’s so anonymous. And the sound system is so much better, we can relax.”
Given a 45 minute slot, they could play half of their notable debut album as well as a couple of covers: ELO’s “Can’t Get It Out of My Head” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York City.”
“All that 70s crap lodged in our head,” he said, though Fountains of Wayne was more informed by Beatlesque pop and bands like Aztec Camera and Prefab Sprout.
He talked about that first album, written in a giddy rush during a late 1995 New York reunion of he and his Williams College buddy Chris Collingwood.
Schlesinger was in the band Ivy at the time; Collingwood had recently quit the Boston band Mercy Buckets.
“It was Christmastime and nobody was in town, and he called me and said he had written the three stupidest songs I ever heard,” Schlesinger said. “I thought they were brilliant.”
They were: “Leave the Biker,” “Joe Rey” and “Radiation Vibe” — all of which made the debut album, as did Schlesinger’s contributions, “Sink to the Bottom” and “She’s Got a Problem.”
They had actually amassed a lot of songs together.
“We got together in a bar in our neighborhood and decided what we wanted to do with his stuff. We got a couple of napkins and wrote all these song titles down and started splitting them up.”
In the end, he said, “all the dumbest titles” made the cut, starting their run of great, winsome pop.
At the time, Schlesinger’s songwriting had earned him the title song of the Tom Hanks movie “That Thing You Do.” Better known rockers had all submitted songs, from XTC to They Might be Giants, but it was Schlesinger’s indelible tune that stood out.
“When we heard Adam Schlesinger’s cassette it was instantly clear which track we would need to learn,” tweeted Ethan Embry who played bass for the Wonders, the fictional one-hit band in the 1996 movie written, directed and co-starring Tom Hanks, his first effort for a film company called Playtone.
“There would be no Playtone without Adam Schlesinger,” tweeted Hanks, himself one of the first celebrities hit with COVID-19, though he has been recovering. “Terribly sad today.”
Although the film version was ultimately sung by the Candy Butcher’s Mike Viola, Schlesinger said “they did use some vocal tracks from my original master tape.”
The single got an Oscar nomination and even charted. But Schlesinger said Fountains of Wayne would never play the song.
“We don’t want to be Eddie and the Cruisers,” he told me, quoting another rock movie about a fictional band. “That’d be pretty pathetic.”
He kept a hand in film, while continuing the band, writing three songs for “Music and Lyrics,” producing music for “There’s Something About Mary” and “Josie and the Pussycats” and a dozen other titles. He cowrote a musical with “Daily Show” writer David Javerbaum, an adaptation of John Waters’ “Cry-Baby” that got Tony nominations, and was working on one with Sarah Silverman based on her “The Bedwetter.”
He won Emmys for songs he wrote for “Sesame Street” and the Tony Awards telecast (“It’s Not Just for Gays Anymore”).
And he got a handful of Emmy nominations for the 157 (!) songs he wrote or co-wrote for the four seasons of the CW musical series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” Among those nominated were “Settle for Me,” “We Tapped that Ass,” “Antidepressants Are So Not a big Deal” and “Meet Rebecca.”
“He did such an amazing job,” star Rachel Bloom said at a TV Critics Association gathering in 2017.
“He produced every single song we made,” showrunner Aline Brosh McKenna said in a tweet.
He also produced all the Fountains of Wayne albums, and supervised the 2016 comeback album from The Monkees, to which he contributed “Our Own World.”
Some say Schlesinger should have been much better known for his wide-ranging and clever work, but his music managed to imbue the world whether its delighted listeners knew his name or not.