Adam Schlesinger’s Incandescent Songwriting Talent

Adam Schlesinger, who died on Wednesday, at fifty-two, of complications from COVID-19, had an unusual public profile. He was a successful musician—very successful, by any reasonable measure. He played in acclaimed bands; he composed songs and scores for movies and Broadway and television shows. He won a Grammy and three Emmys, and was nominated for an Oscar and a couple of Tonys.

Adam Schlesinger’s death underscores the horror of the coronavirus pandemic and the failures of leadership that have brought it about.Photograph by Kevin Winter / NBCUniversal / Getty

But Schlesinger was not a star. You couldn’t really even call him famous. In part, this was a factor of history. He was a co-founder of two pop-rock groups, Ivy and Fountains of Wayne, which earned major label deals and boutique stardom, then faded as the cultural center of gravity shifted from rock to hip-hop. Schlesinger’s career had an old-fashioned flavor. He was a craftsman in the Brill Building and Tin Pan Alley mold: a record producer, multi-instrumentalist, and, supremely, a songwriter, who thrived behind the scenes. He was never the lead singer of any band. Onstage, he cut a diffident figure, playing the bass and stepping to the microphone every now and then to sing harmony vocals.

Schlesinger’s death will undoubtedly bring him greater renown than he knew in life. With the terrible instant clarity that tragedy confers, it’s now easy to recognize him for what he was: a modest man of immodestly lavish talent. He was one of the great songwriters of his generation, with a body of work that stands next to those of far bigger boldface names.

Those gifts grabbed the ears of fans and critics on Fountains of Wayne records. Formed in New York, in the mid-nineties, by Schlesinger and another songwriter, his college classmate Chris Collingwood, the group snuck in under the banner of “alternative rock,” which boomed following the triumph of Nirvana’s “Nevermind.” But, on Fountains of Wayne’s self-titled début, from 1996, the band displayed little connection to mainstream American alt-rock, with its grunge aesthetics and mawkish blend of angst and aggro. The music was power-pop: Beatles chords, Beach Boys harmonies, the blaring guitars and catchy choruses of seventies AM-radio staples like the Raspberries and Cheap Trick. Songs like “I’ve Got a Flair” and “Sick Day” established Schlesinger and Collingwood, the band’s singer, as classicists with a sure command of song form, expertly honoring and tweaking tradition. That formal mastery would eventually inspire an admiring sendup by the Chicago songwriter Robbie Fulks, “Fountains of Wayne Hotline” (2005), in which a Midwestern country singer seeks advice on how to punch up his tunes, Fountains of Wayne style. It is a great piece of rock criticism, and the finest tribute to Schlesinger’s ninja skills you’re likely to encounter.

What really set the band apart was its lyrics. Collingwood wrote his share of songs, but Schlesinger wrote more, and he wrote the best ones. He was a storyteller and a joke teller; often as not, his punch lines turned into insights, and vice versa. The sensibility, and the subject matter, came into focus on the albums “Utopia Parkway,” from 1999, and “Welcome Interstate Managers,” from 2003. There were vivid character sketches (“Well, I’ve been saving for a custom van / And I’ve been playing in a cover band”) and surreal social satire (“He was killed by a cellular-phone explosion / They scattered his ashes across the ocean / The water was used to make baby lotion / The wheels of promotion were set into motion”). The songs are unmistakably Generation X artifacts, full of pop-culture references, memories of high-school dances and drinking binges, and a pervasive sense of middle-class downward mobility—the mark of a songwriter who came of age in the “slacker” recession of the early nineties.

Over the years, Schlesinger’s dramatic personae grew to encompass a motley cross-section of humanity: elderly men kibbitzing over bagels in a diner; an imperious desk attendant at the D.M.V.; a lonely commuter looking for love on the Boston-bound Acela; a middle-aged woman who does mushrooms while vacationing at her parents’ country house; hapless hipster-entrepreneurs who go belly up after opening “a boutique they called Debris/Together with some kid from F.I.T.”; and, of course, the teen-age boy who lusts after his friend’s mother in “Stacy’s Mom,” which was Fountains of Wayne’s one hit, reaching No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the autumn of 2003.

Schlesinger’s cheekiness and light touch, and the boundless catchiness of his tunes, has caused some listeners to overlook his greatness as a social chronicler. He was a commemorator of suburban teen folkways, the junky souvenirs for sale at gas-station convenience stores, the on-air banter of local news anchors—the particulars of unglamorous everyday life. He wrote about kids getting stoned at a planetarium laser show; he wrote about a couple marooned in an airport, searching for luggage that failed to show up at baggage claim. Some songwriters compose odes to hot rods and luxury coupes; Schlesinger’s car song is about a Subaru jalopy: “I bought a car off a couple of ladies way upstate / Took off the Greenpeace sticker and the New Hampshire plates.” If future investigators want to understand the aspirations and setbacks of a certain kind of early-twenty-first century middle-class American white person, the Schlesinger songbook will be a benchmark text. What they’ll find there, alongside the jokes and details, is deep human sympathy. Consider “Hey Julie,” from 2003, a love song set against the soul-numbing backdrop of a lousy office job:

Working all day for a mean little man
With a clip-on tie and a rub-on tan
He’s got me running ’round the office
Like a dog around a track
But when I get back home you’re always there to rub my back

Hey, Julie, look what they’re doing to me
Trying to trip me up
Trying to wear me down
Julie, I swear it’s
So hard to bear it
And I’d never make it through without you around

These songs have a pronounced regional accent: they are anthems of the New York City outer boroughs and suburbs. There is a connection to the songbook of Billy Joel, whom Schlesinger admired. (Joel’s far more dyspeptic and bombastic music may reflect a class difference: he grew up lower middle class in Hicksville, on Long Island; Schlesinger was raised in tonier Montclair, New Jersey, and attended Williams College.) But Schlesinger also wrote urbane songs. If Fountains of Wayne was a bridge-and-tunnel band, Ivy was Manhattan—and, in a way, Paris. The group formed in 1994, when Schlesinger and his friend Andy Chase met Dominique Durand, a Frenchwoman whom Chase later married. The trio recorded six studio albums, including one masterpiece, “Apartment Life,” in 1997, a beautiful record that takes in Europop, Brill Building ballads, lounge, bossa nova, and other cosmopolitan styles.

The songs, sung by Durand in a vibratoless croon, showcase Schlesinger’s concision and depth—they’re vignettes about the dreams and disappointments of city dwellers, sketched in short, swift strokes. The tonal difference between the Fountains of Wayne and Ivy material is striking. On “Apartment Life,” the stage sets are sparsely appointed, and the lyrics are clipped and ruminative: “You put your book down / And stare into space / You turn all the lights down / So I won’t see your face.” The chiming “I’ve Got a Feeling” may be Schlesinger’s greatest ballad: a bone-simple marriage of words and music that sounds inevitable, like a song that has always existed.

“Apartment Life” is a testament to Schlesinger’s range. He was one of those artist-fans who seem to have imbibed all of pop history, and are capable of decanting a song in any style at will. The sixties bubblegum pastiche “That Thing You Do!,” written for the 1996 film directed by Tom Hanks, earned Schlesinger an Oscar nomination. An even better Schlesinger movie song is the power ballad “Way Back Into Love,” from “Music and Lyrics,” a Hugh Grant–Drew Barrymore rom-com from 2007. In both films, the songs are central to the plot; if the music wasn’t great, the movies would have collapsed. Schlesinger delivered, with a virtuosity that recalled the writers who churned out timeless tunes for the movie-musical “backstagers” of Hollywood’s golden age.

That’s a heady comparison, but I think posterity will ratify it. Schlesinger is an all-timer. Listen to the songs he composed for young artists like the Click Five and Fever High; listen to the songs he wrote for fogies like America and the Monkees. Listen to the stuff he wrote for a Stephen Colbert Christmas special, for “Sesame Street,” for the Tony Awards. Dip into the more than a hundred and fifty brainy, goofy musical-theatre-style songs he wrote for “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” the comedy-drama musical series that ran for four years on the CW. Schlesinger’s cleverness is on display in all this music, but the songs are never mere exercises in style. They’re always full of feeling and ideas. They’re always a little weird.

You can hear that combination in one of his finest pieces of work, the Fountains of Wayne ballad “All Kinds of Time.” The title is taken from a football play-by-play announcers’ cliché, when a well-protected quarterback has a few extra seconds to stand back in the pocket and deliver a pass. But in Schlesinger’s lyrics—sung by Collingwood in a melody that rolls out, as if in slow motion, over shuddering guitars—the phrase becomes metaphysical, describing a long moment when time seems to decelerate. The song brings us inside the consciousness of the quarterback, who takes the snap, surveys the field, and reaches a kind of Zen state: “He seems so at ease / A strange inner peace.” His mind flits from the action at hand to thoughts of his family and fiancée watching the game at home on TV. Then, finally, the Q.B. spots his receiver, a football epiphany that doubles as a spiritual one: “He looks to the left / He looks to the right / And there in a golden ray of light / Is his open man / Just like he planned.”

Adam Schlesinger didn’t get the time he deserved. Fifty-two is too young to die; the loss underscores the horror of the coronavirus pandemic and the unconscionable failures of leadership that have brought it about. But songs like “All Kinds of Time” offer some solace. Like the quarterback peering over the scrumming linemen, Schlesinger had downfield vision. He saw both the minutiae and the grand designs, and he turned those observations into three- and four-minute-long works of art that are surprising and fun and unpretentious and profound. Schlesinger lives on in those songs, and the songs will outlast the rest of us.

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