This morning I woke up to the news that Adam Schlesinger of the Fountains of Wayne had died in New York of COVID-19. He's not family, he's not somebody I knew personally, and as a "celebrity" he probably got significantly better care than most Corona victims. But yeah. Still.

He was only 52 years old, and probably in my top 10 of favourite songwriters ever. He should have been able to write *so* much more amazing music -- and now he won't. I'll post a couple of links in this thread to illustrate why to me he was one of the greats.

Adam's brief for this song was to make it "sound like an American band that was blown away by The Beatles right after they arrived and was trying to imitate them". The result is not just a perfect early-60s pop pastiche but a genuine classic:

Another movie song, this one much more straightforward parody, but it shows the man couldn't help himself: while piling mocking cliché upon cliché the result is nevertheless again a perfectly fine song in its own right:

With Fountains of Wayne songs it is not always known which songs were written by Adam and which by Chris, but as a band they were always more than the sum of their parts anyway. Adam typically wrote the funny story songs with punchlines and jokes:

But FoW could also be introspective verging on bleak. And while I suspect this might be one of Chris's, it is also one of the most heartbreaking songs FoW ever did, and as such a perfect song to end this thread with: