Welcome Interstate Managers is a perfect and great album. Every song is necessary and loved. Some of the songs are serious, some are lighthearted, but even the trifles are brilliant.

That said: this album has 17 tracks (including the bonus). Some of these great songs are greater than the other great songs. I’m here to help you figure out which songs are indispensable and which ones are merely excellent.

I should caveat this discussion with the obvious: All of Fountains of Wayne’s albums are deep and rich and full of gems. You may have a fondness for one or two specific songs that I don’t, and vice versa. Neither of us are wrong; this album is just that good.

17. “Peace and Love”

A fun rollick, gently skewering hippies with a straightforward tune. But it ultimately doesn’t leave much of an impression — none of the lines or musical flourishes are as clever as this album’s peaks.

16. “Yours and Mine”

The abbreviated acoustic closer is a hallowed rock album tradition, and this is a great one. The portrait of a predictable suburban couple winding down is vintage Fountains warm satire, equal parts affection and eye-roll. It’s a minute long, but makes the most of those 62 seconds: two lovely verses and a melodica solo.

15. “Supercollider”

If “Yours and Mine” is too short, “Supercollider” is too long. The power ballad showcases some Liam Gallagher-esque vocals by Chris Collingwood and skillful guitar. It’s far from a stinker, but would have been just as effective at 3 minutes instead of 5.

14. “Elevator Up”

The driving bonus track fondly depicts a night of debauchery, with not-so-winking nods to various recreational narcotics. The guitar work is cool, if not as catchy as some Fountains tracks. Bonus points for ending the song (and album) with “any way the wind blows.”

13. “Halley’s Waitress”

The gag is dumb, but the song is absolutely gorgeous. Poor restaurant service inspires a wistful plea. Luscious horns and vocal harmonies elevate the throwaway to beauty.

12. “Little Red Light”

When Fountains focuses on minor details, the writing always shines. Here it’s the voicemail light on a “big black Radio Shack digital portable phone” as the protagonist waits for his ex to call him back. A muscular power pop composition complements the heartbreak wonderfully.

11. “No Better Place”

A delightful pop confection about struggling to say goodbye. The melody is a bit less tuneful, a bit more reflective and abstract than some of Fountains other work, which immediately makes me think this is a Collingwood joint, not Schlesinger.

10. “Bought for a Song”

Rarely does Fountains of Wayne come across as jaded, yet here we are (oddly, before their one big hit). The band’s power pop chops are unleashed with shimmering guitars and peppy beats.

9. “Fire Island”

The parents are out of town, so the teenager throws a big party. What if this wasn’t a cheesy high school cliche, but an earnest moment of contemplation? You’d get “Fire Island” — a spiritual sibling to “Prom Theme” from Utopia Parkway, nearly as exquisite as the latter but not quite as evocative. (A prom, unlike a party, is already symbolic as a farewell to childhood.)

8. “Hung Up on You”

Fountains go alt country to fantastic effect. This deep cut plays around with the idiom “hung up” as both unrequited love and cut off phone call, with some of the album’s best lines: When the narrator is at a bar to use its payphone to call his baby, he has “an appetite for poison and a suitcase full of dimes.”

7. “Valley Winter Song”

There’s a depressing numbness to snowfall, the kind that can wear down a romantic heart. “Valley Winter Song” hits paritcularly strong because there’s almost no jokiness in sight — just longing for sunbeams in one of the loveliest tunes on the album.

6. “Bright Future in Sales”

One of the slickest tracks (also funniest) on the album; this could have been a single. The lyrics make clear the alcoholic protagonist doesn’t have a bright future in anything unless he “gets his shit together.”

5. “Hey Julie”

One of the most straightforward love songs on Managers, yet still fueled by satire: “Hey Julie” is as much about a soul-crushing white-collar 9-to-5 as it is the wholesome love waiting at home. The melody is bright and chipper, buoyed by some warm acoustic guitar and harmonica.

4. “Mexican Wine”

A goofball power pop epic, “Mexican Wine” is maybe the catchiest song on the album. Chronicling two losers who deserve each other (in a sweet way), the song glides on crunchy chords and a layered, harmony-filled production. The lyrics are jokey but charming, and it’s hard to imagine a stronger opener for this album.

3. “Stacy’s Mom”

When Adam Schlesinger wrote “Stacy’s Mom,” his songwriting partner Chris Collingwood didn’t want to record it. He didn’t want to release it as a single. He knew it was too good and would define the band’s legacy. He was right. The song towers above everything else around it. “Stacy’s Mom” has a historically euphoric chorus, elevated to the stratosphere with power pop alchemy equal parts technical precision and sophomoric giddiness. Yes, it’s a MILF anthem, but it’s also an all-time banger.

2. “Hackensack”

It would be easy to take the subject of “Hackensack” and turn him into a pathetic punching bag: A paint-scraping schmuck who can’t escape his dead-end Jersey hometown, but pines for the movie star he went to high school with. Yet, Schlesinger went the other way. He made his protagonist a longing, romantic hero — hopeless and deluded, for sure — but pure of spirit. The song’s melody is heart-rending and perfect, hummable yet spiritual like a church hymn for the loser who still believes in love. If it’s not Adam Schlesinger’s best song ever, it’s pretty damn close.

1.”All Kinds of Time”

A moment in amber: The college quarterback dodges defenders and scans the field for his receivers. The air is pregnant with possibility and tension; of hope and culmination.

Adam Schlesinger takes this moment, and the phrase that announcers often use to describe a quarterback in the backfield (“he’s got all kinds of time!”), into something infinitely poetic. The repeated cadence of “all kinds of time” builds in power as it recurs and its implicit scope expands. “Time” becomes a marker of youth, but of inevitable mortality, of a reality bound by a universal currency.

There’s a triumph in the song’s climax, a hint of a great score on the horizon. Yet even that drowns in a cadence of “all kinds of time” — a moment gone as quickly as it appeared, powered by a “Champagne Supernova”-style guitar swirl.

The song was and always will be a masterpiece. But it feels especially powerful in the wake of Schlesinger’s abrupt COVID death: Time was more fleeting for Adam than he (or we) realized. And while he certainly made the most of his years, his “all kinds of time” vanished too quickly, snuffed out like a candle. A year later, it still fucking sucks to think about, the irreplaceable void of genius he left behind.

“All Kinds of Time” makes me think about Adam’s days and weeks and years that could have been; it also makes me grateful for the fantastic music he created in the time he was here.

It’s basically impossible to succinctly describe Bruce Springsteen artistic output. He is large, he contains multitudes.

The Boss has released 18 studio albums over the past 45 years and developed a reputation for unsurpassed, marathon live performances. His commitment to heartland rock is easy to parody; it’s also key to his expansive creative achievement. Springsteen took a cliche mindset towards rock — of capturing the sound and feel of lower-middle class America with earnest intensity — and exploded it into a sprawling canvas for dramatic, poetic masterpieces.

Any discussion of Springsteen’s long career is compelled to break it into segments. I am going to break it into two periods: the era before he first broke up the E-Street band and moved to LA (1973-89) and the era after (1989-present).

Every album in the first era is essential; nearly every album in the second is non-essential. The rest of this article will focus mainly on the eight albums Bruce recorded from the former, and will entirely dismiss the latter. Trust me; it’s simpler this way.

Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen was born in 1949 and released his debut album at age 24. Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. offered the vision of an earthier Bob Dylan, ruminating on young love and political purity with polysyllabic ease. Moments of the album are fully formed — notably the heart-rending “For You” about a wounded, distant lover — while others display a raw writing talent still in need of some life experience.

Greetings remains a compelling listen. Bruce’s intense gaze on characters and conundrums is already developed, but the devil is in the details. Some of the songs are too fast and slick (“For You”); others are too slow and sketch-like (“Mary Queen of Arkansas”). All of them are a bit sonically shallow. The lyrics are simply stunning in their literary gusto and enthusiasm for American life; they provide a stark contrast to the cynicism that Bruce would develop over the next several years.

As promising as Greetings is, it was hardly appropriate preparation for The Wild, the Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle, Springsteen’s sophomore triumph. He released it in 1973, less than a year after his debut, but it is an artistic leap.

In fact, Bruce Springsteen’s second album is quite possibly my favorite by any artist, ever. Period. A nostalgic farewell and euphoric celebration, E-Street Shuffle is buoyed by the E-Street Band’s jazzy contemplation of urban chaos, and the beauty that emerges from within.

I can’t bare the thought of my readers not enjoying this odyssey, so please: go listen. All seven songs are perfect, and required listening. From the jittery opening “E-Street Shuffle” — which captures the seductive rhythm of a big city — through a half dozen romances and heartbreaks, through closer “New York City Serenade” — which transforms an awkward hookup into an exploration of the unexpected artistry of burough life — Bruce leverages The E-Street Band’s profound expressiveness into luxurious poetry.

I have to give a shoutout in particular to “Rosalita,” a pulsing love letter to a young Latina woman. It’s a breathless proclamation, somehow both nuanced in irony and warp-speed in desire, as rock and roll should be. “Rosalita” has become a high-energy live staple, but the life- and flesh-loving studio recording might be the greatest rock record of the 20th century. “I just wanna be in love, ain’t no lie,” indeed.

While E-Street Shuffle’s full-hearted pilgrimage resonated with critics, it failed to gain much commercial traction. The masses wanted theatrics and melodrama. They wanted for love to transcend life’s bad breaks. They wanted a “last chance power drive.” They wanted Born to Run.

Bruce’s third album came out in 1975, two years after E-Street Shuffle, and it’s one of rock’s towering achievements on every axis. It earned Bruce magazine covers and went triple-platinum. Where his first two albums relied on performance ahead of production, Born to Run brings a Spector-like dedication to layered soundscape. The result, paired with Bruce’s operatic lyrics of street struggles, is a monument of rock ‘n’ roll force.

The huge sound couples nicely with equally giant songs. The title track is rightfully iconic, conveying such drama that its climax of “broken heroes” takes my breath away every time. “Backstreets” is another winner, a gripping portrait of two friends who never found their break. And the closer, the ten-minute “Jungleland,” is half West Side Story, half Wagner — a “real death waltz between what’s flesh and what’s fantasy.”

My personal favorite track — a contender for my favorite song ever — is the opener, “Thunder Road.” Bruce lays out his vision in clear terms: Gone are previous albums’ “Cheshire smiles” and “aurora rising behind us.” Bruce is ready — desperate — to break the bonds of decaying normalcy. His vision is grand and sad, but tinged with hopes of “pulling out of here to win.” That sax outro is Heaven.

With Born to Run, Bruce traded in the exuberant lilt of his first two albums for a dramatic intensity that pays dividends. But this newer, more disillusioned, rocker hits a few minor road bumps. A couple tracks, like “Night” and “She’s the One,” lack the specificity and music-lyric synergy of Bruce’s best works: The words are simply a bit boring for The Boss.

Nonetheless, nobody can question Born to Run’s status as a masterpiece and a seminal point in the history of American rock.

As the global acclaim poured in, the E Street Band’s internal troubles picked up. Bruce decided to ditch his first producer-manager, Mike Appel, in favor of Jon Landau. The ensuing legal struggle kept Springsteen from recording for more than a year.

During that time, Bruce kept writing and performing. He wrote and discarded whole albums, performing snippets in live shows along the way. One abandoned album, The Promise, became a bit of rock and roll myth along the lines of The Beach Boys’ SMiLE. (And, like SMiLE, The Promise finally received a proper release to critical acclaim decades later.)

The album that finally came out in 1978, three years after Born to Run, was titled Darkness on the Edge of Town. It discarded operatic angst for something leaner and meaner. Darkness never achieved the widespread love of Born to Run, but it has gone down as a true classic. It’s certainly one of my two or three favorites in his discography.

The conventional wisdom is that Bruce embraced the mindset of his manager, Landau, who doubled as a revered rock critic. As any busy critic would appreciate, Darkness is less sprawling and more direct. It grows angrier as it digs deeper into the American heartland. The production is tense, often muscular, and every song is unmissable.

Opening with a trifecta of “Badlands,” “Adam Raised a Cain,” and “Something in the Night,” Bruce contemplates inevitable failure (with whiffs of fleeting glory). It’s a stunning stretch of three songs, as Bruce considers the sins we inherit from our community, our parents, and our human nature, respectively.

The album’s most moving moment is “Racing in the Street,” a stark piano ballad. Bruce inverts Martha Reeve’s boundless optimism into a devastating study of a trapped couple in need of absolution. It’s an understated counter to Born to Run’s themes of driving to freedom, of escape requiring nothing more than a working carburetor and gas pedal. It’s a true stunner.

It took Bruce three years to release Darkness’s ten perfect tracks. But it took him less than two to release his next album: a messy, brilliant double album. The River, released late 1980, is yet another artistic flip-flop, and yet another huge victory. Springsteen eschews dour focus for a broader, more diverse effort. Like the titular body of water, this album sometimes runs light and clear, sometimes dark and silty.

On the one hand you have the album’s first disc, featuring drinkalong “Sherry Darling” and infatuated “Crush On You” and romantic “I Wanna Marry You.” Bruce has never been more unburdened than here, goofing on rockabilly and rural partying. He even sounds like he might be having unironic fun — unprecedented for The Boss.

The second half flips the perspective. Bruce is bitter and devastated at his community’s failing. Starting with the bleak “Point Blank” through the heartbreaking “Wreck on the Highway” — a grappling with spontaneous tragedy — he sets a second path for his talent, one that Bruce would take to its extremes on his next album.

The River had brought more color and variety to Springsteen’s sound. Nebraska flipped The Boss narrative on its head with an aesthetically and thematically stark album unlike anything he’d released.

Following a massive, exhausting tour, Bruce hung out at home, reading and watching old movies and writing dozens of songs. He recorded demos on a cassette machine using just his voice and an acoustic guitar. Inspired by old blues and hillbilly records, he mixed the demos with the reverb and echoes turned way up.

Springsteen recorded the songs in the studio with the E-Street Band, but it didn’t sound right. Then, he recorded them in the studio solo, and it still didn’t sound quite right. So he finally decided he’d just release the cassette demos themselves, in all of their lo-fi glory (or lack thereof).

The result is a stylistic marvel: Spare and haunting and echoing, these tracks are defined by their sonic brooding. But within the stripped down timbre, Bruce explores a whole spectrum of storytelling modes: “State Trooper” is tense as a thriller, while “My Father’s House” is mythic and nostalgic. Many of the songs sound same-ish thanks to simple, folk-like melodies, but that only expands the impact of the album’s minute contours.

Bruce brought his storytelling to new heights, too as he surveyed crime and poverty and the impact they have on families. “Atlantic City,” the album’s lone single, cryptically alludes to the narrator’s illicit act without ever specifying it, though his repeated chorus of “everything dies” implies violence. “Nebraska,” the title track, is another highlight, setting the tone for the album, as Bruce inhabits the mind of a romantic murderer.

But few Springsteen tracks have given me quite so much to think about as “Reason to Believe,” the closer. It warps the album’s ruminative quality into a black absurdity. I really just have to share the lyrics of the first verse with you:

“Seen a man standin’ over a dead dog lyin’ by the highway in a ditch / He’s lookin’ down kinda puzzled, pokin’ that dog with a stick / Got his car door flung open; he’s standin’ out on Highway 31 / Like if he stood there long enough that dog’d get up and run / It struck me kinda funny; seem’d kinda funny, sir, to me / Still, at the end of every hard day, people find some reason to believe”

“Reason to Believe” – Nebraska – 1982

Every time I listen to the song my opinion of the dude poking the dog changes. Why does he expect the dog to wake up? Why does he care if it does? Is there any reason to hope for something that will never come true? Or, as Bruce pondered in “The River,” is “a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”

Mercifully, he’d take a 180 on the outlook and tone of middle class life with his next album, one of the all-time smashes in American rock ‘n’ roll.

Born in the USA’s cover features a denim-clad ass, which is both a perfect image — vintage mid-1980’s indulgent fun — and a bit deceptive, because Born in the USA isn’t macho posturing. It’s pretty and fun, but it also digs deep.

Take the title track, which sounds like a patriotic mantra; then you listen to the words and realize it’s about a busted American dream: “End up like a dog that’s been beat too much / ‘Til you spend half your life just covering up.”

This is one of Bruce’s most consistent albums, and its smashing commercial success is proof: seven of its twelve tracks made the Billboard Top Ten. Tonally, the album embraces human connection and strength: the magnificent “No Surrender” is his biggest battle cry since “Born to Run,” while closer “My Hometown” finds dignity and progress in multi-generation one-horse towns.

“Dancing in the Dark” is the album’s most enduring moment, one of the defining tracks of Gen X young adulthood (even though Bruce is a Boomer): he stammers his inadequacies, laments a dream and a love just out of reach, yet vows to keep searching for a “spark” to ignite his life. It’s been played 160 million times on Spotify.

Yet, for me, the defining Born in the U.S.A. track is “Glory Days,” the perfect straddle of the album’s two tones. It’s a disillusioned portrait of an alcoholic who peaked in high school — and simultaneously an honest-to-goodness bar band stomper. Bruce mocks the aimlessness of its characters, but doesn’t disdain them. It’s a delicate, perfect, balancing act.

Despite universal acclaim and record-breaking sales, Born in the U.S.A. typically falls behind his earlier albums in fan adoration. In a massive poll of obsessives ranking his best songs, only two Born in the U.S.A. songs landed in the top 50. It almost tempts me to call this platinum-selling, five-star landmark an underrated album.

Bruce’s discography is a perpetual pendulum, so it should come as no surprise that he followed his cathedral-sized slice of Americana with something more personal and pained.

Tunnel of Love, Springsteen’s eighth album, consists mostly of midtempo, diaristic love songs produced with heavy doses of synths and drum machines. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this describes basically every rock album of the late 1980’s. Still, it was new ground, sonically and lyrically, for The Boss.

This is the type of album critics call “mature” — complex, well-written vignettes without simple resolution. The tension here is more mundane, less operatic than ever: glances and sighs and touches. Much of the lyrical content addresses, directly or indirectly, Bruce’s imploding marriage with Julianne Phillips. Perhaps the most indicting song is the album’s signature track, “Brilliant Disguise,” about two lovers who have to pretend to be other people around each other.

Most of the album is drowned in synthesizers, Bruce’s new composing toy. The overall feel of the album is a bit droning, which aligns with the album’s each-day’s-a-chore lyrical tone.

A few tracks spike the formula. “Spare Parts” is some straight-ahead blues, and my personal favorite number on Tunnel of Love (Janey is a heroine). Meanwhile, “Cautious Man” features a stripped-down production that evokes Nebraska.

During the album’s recording and tour, Bruce ended his three-year marriage and began a relationship with his backup singer, Patti Scialfa. He also informed the E-Street Band that he would no longer need their services: He was moving to California.

And that’s where my focused attention on Springsteen discography ends. The breakup of the E-Street Band (though they’d reunite a decade later) provides a clean end of The Boss’s peak artistic output. Nonetheless, here’s a quick summary of the rest of his discography:

After a five year break, Springsteen simultaneously released two albums, Human Touch and Lucky Town, both recorded in Los Angeles with session musicians. Both were critical flops. In 1995 he penned the all-acoustic The Ghost of Tom Joad, which got decent reviews but bombed in sales (an awful album cover probably didn’t help).

The late ‘90s saw some re-releases (including a smash Greatest Hits album) and archive digging (the four-disc Tracks compilation), plus plenty of touring in the wake of the E-Street Band’s reunion.

Following the September 11 attacks, Bruce released The Rising, an acclaimed call for resilience and redemption. It reshaped the narrative around his career: A legitimate hit with zeitgeist power, The Rising ushered Bruce from awkward middle age to rock statesman, effectively immune from criticism, a position he’s held in the 17 years since.

Since ‘02, he’s released six original studio albums: Devils & Dust, Magic, Working on a Dream, Wrecking Ball, High Hopes, and Western Stars. All except the latter topped the Billboard album chart and received rave reviews from Rolling Stone, aka the Boss-is-God Rag. I personally haven’t listened to any of them more than one time through, so I’ll leave my implicit review of these albums at that.

(I should note that my cynicism of these albums is not universal; many dedicated Springsteen fans rank some tracks from later albums among his best ever.)

The years 2016-2018 were big ones for Bruce. First, he released an acclaimed and bestselling autobiography entitled Born to Run. I have a copy on my shelf which I hope to read soon.

In 2017, Bruce was given a yearlong residency at Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway, doing acoustic shows with storytelling in between tracks. He eventually recorded the show, and released both as a Netflix special and live album.

It’s my favorite thing he’s released in years — intimate, funny, seasoned, just masterful. I highly recommend it. It’s actually not a bad entry point to Bruce’s personal songwriting voice.

The most curious late-Bruce album is not an original, but We Will Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a Pete Seeger cover album. It charts a new potential path for Bruce as a folk archaeologist, elevating American standards with his natural charm. It’s a loose, conversational album, which is exactly what I love about it. (Frankly, I’m more interested in America’s great, overlooked songs than anything a 70-year-old millionaire has to say.)

I’d love to spend a few more thousand words here dissecting some of Springsteen’s songwriting and motifs. Some of his favorite symbol are: water (as a source of destruction and absolution), day vs. night (as a line between societal conformity and rebellion), and houses (as an emblem of social standing).

But I’ll wrap this up by pointing out his most recurrent and important symbol: Cars.

In Springsteen’s lyrics, cars capture so much about the a human’s agency, or lack thereof. In “Thunder Road,” they’re an escape from hometown “ghosts”; in “Racing in the Street,” they’re the false hope and empty thrill of whipping around dead streets with nowhere to go; in “State Trooper,” they’re the careening force of destruction as impulses go unchecked.

When Bruce starts talking about a car, that means it’s time to start paying attention. Because he’s doing what he’s done time and again throughout his career:

Take what could have been so mundane and prosaic, a blue collar kid singing with a local band about ordinary people, and escalated it to greatness. “Pullin’ out of here to win,” indeed.

Adam Schlesinger, the absurdly talented and prolific songwriter, died yesterday from coronavirus complications. Go to hell, COVID-19.

Schlesinger, best known for co-founding Fountains of Wayne and co-writing over 150 songs for the musical-comedy TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, was 52. He had been churning out songs and musical projects for more than 25 years for several media, across several genres, and in many capacities (writer, bassist, producer, etc.). He was an EGOT-nominee.

Also, if you’ve had any conversation about music with me in the past five years, you’ve probably heard me rhapsodize Schlesinger. I loved his knack for writing hooks in any environment, for popping up as a songwriting credit in unexpected places, and producing a tremendous, surprising catalog of songs. He’s one of my favorite songwriters ever. (I dedicated a whole week to him in my 2018 Song of the Day series, and it was tough to stop at seven tracks.)

Any retrospective of Schlesinger’s work should begin with Fountains of Wayne, one of the great and underappreciated bands of the past quarter century. Schlesinger paired with Chris Collingwood in a Lennon-McCartney-type partnership on songwriting duties. (And much like The Beatles’ glory days — some tracks are true co-writes while some are the product of one in particular, and it’s ambiguous enough that fans really like to debate and speculate who wrote what.)

Despite one crossover hit (the iconic “Stacy’s Mom”), Fountains of Wayne remained on the fringes of mainstream for their 5-album, 18-year run. In 1996, their self-titled debut pigeon-holed the band as a Weezer knock-off thanks to its power-poppy sound, huge hooks, slightly goofy lyrics, and heavy dollop of nostalgia. They followed it with the coming-of-age masterpiece Utopia Parkway.

Fountains of Wayne got their big breakthrough in 2003 with Welcome, Interstate Managers, which is their best and most popular album. Despite the inclusion of “Stacy’s Mom,” the album’s main theme is the grindstone of young adulthood — from dour (the alcoholic in “Bright Future in Sales”) to sweet (“Hey Julie”). The album is absolutely loaded with power pop and soft rock gems, none better than the lovely “Hackensack,” perhaps Schlesinger’s greatest song ever.

The band’s last two albums, Traffic and Weather in 2007 and Sky Full of Holes in 2011, showed continuing maturity in lyrical content: “Yolanda Hayes” is a love story from the DMV and “Action Hero” is a moving tribute to middle age manhood.

While it’s tempting for me to overstate Fountains of Wayne’s greatness, the truth is that part of the band’s charm is how undramatic and low-key it is. Schlesinger and Collingwood craft biting satire and lovely character portraits through low-stakes, no-angst suburban drama. Schlesinger’s and Collingwood’s keen eye for details and human dignity elevated Fountains’ lyrics.

It also helped that Schlesinger can flat out write. He could curve from earnestness to satire and back in half a beat. On high school graduation: “We’ll go our separate ways / We’ll vanish in the haze … Soon we’ll say goodbye / Then we’ll work until we die.” He could write stories in just a few tuneful syllables. Lamenting a long drive to visit a lover: “It’s a nine-hour drive / From me to you / South on I-95 / And I’ll do it ‘til the day that I die / If I need to.”

Like Billy Joel, one of his obvious inspirations, Schlesinger’s knack for blending his technical chops with his pop instincts are outstanding. Despite the huge hooks and lovely tunes, these aren’t three-chord ditties. They’re relistenable and sneaky-deep.

Fountains of Wayne would typically take a few years between albums, and each album brought questions of whether it’d be Schlesinger and Collingwood’s last. The pair had a falling out sometime in the last five years, and Sky Full of Holes was likely to be their last ever, or at least for a long, long time.

Schlesinger’s second flagship band was Ivy. It actually predated Fountains of Wayne by two years, arriving near the grunge peak and providing a lightweight alternative. French chanteuse Dominique Durand lends the band a classy, vintage feel, while Schlesinger’s robust composition and production brings the Ivy above the typical indie pop outfit. Ivy survived more than 15 years, releasing 6 albums, and had been on hiatus since 2011.

Leading two bands — an all-time favorite and an indie darling — would have been enough of a career for most, but part of Schlesinger’s towering achievement was the past 10-15 years when he ascended as one of the premier songwriting talents-for-hire on the entire music scene.

Among his many talents, chief was his ability to adopt different styles like a musical chameleon, particularly for soundtracks. One of his first notable credits was writing the title track for the film That Thing You Do! (a favorite of mine). He made it sound like a legitimate hit from the mid ‘60s. A decade later, he wrote the Wham! knock-off “Meaningless Kiss” for Music and Lyrics — and it’s a better George Michael song than most George Michael songs.

But never was Schlesinger more challenged to inhabit different styles than on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, where he served as one of three chief songwriters and music directors from 2015-19. From parodies of chipper Broadway numbers (“West Covina”), to Bollywood (“I’m So Good At Yoga”), to torch songs (“You Stupid Bitch”), to electronica (“Having a Few People Over”), to ‘90s R&B (“Put Yourself First”) and so-so-so much more, the musical output and variety of the show’s soundtrack is bewildering. And that’s before you consider the difficulty curve of having to hammer out two or three songs every week for years on end.

In my mind, Schlesinger’s biggest accomplishment on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was writing the only good “Piano Man” pastiche ever, “What’ll It Be?” Funny but also legitimately evocative, it’s nearly as good as Joel’s classic. The Crazy Ex-Girlfriend soundtrack includes Schlesinger’s demo of the track — the only song on any album that I’m aware of where he has solo artist credits.

The above broad strokes of Schlesinger’s career leave out whole swaths of accomplishments. His writing/performance credits include:

• The lone album by power pop supergroup Tinted Windows
• “Text Me Merry Christmas,” perhaps the best Christmas original of the 2010s
• “Just the Girl” by The Click Five, maybe my #1 all time guilty pleasure song
• cult-hit soundtrack to Josie and the Pussycats
• An album and EP by hip New York synth-pop duo Fever High
• The soundtrack to the Tony-nominated musical Cry-Baby
• A killer early Jonas Bros tune (“I Am What I Am”) and a Bowling For Soup banger (“High School Never Ends”)
• The Grammy-winning songs for Stephen Colbert’s Christmas special

And even that list is missing plenty of stuff. He was frequently recruited to write or produce numbers for awards shows. He produced dozens of albums. His talents were spread far and wide.

When he abruptly died yesterday, the public outpouring was huge. It blew me away, actually. Not only did the expected voices pay tribute — people who worked closely with him on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, old white music critics, etc. — but so did hundreds of celebrities who have worked with him.

The New York Times critic who wrote a retrospective claimed he was asked to choose twelve tracks, but couldn’t limit himself to any less than 30. Almost everyone who has commented has spoken of his talent and generosity. Even Tom Hanks, whose Twitter account is mostly pictures of orphan socks the distinguished actor found on LA sidewalks, tweeted his condolences and praise.

So my request to anyone who made it this far is for you to spin a Schlesinger song — maybe “Prom Theme” or “Hackensack” or “That Thing You Do” — and admire its craft and think about how well-written music can really make you feel feelings. And be sad that our universe has one less shining Playtone star than it had yesterday. Rest in peace, Adam.

(As a bonus, here’s a picture of Adam with the four actors who played The Wonders in That Thing You Do! Credit to Jonathon Schaech’s Twitter account. Adam is in the middle.)

In September, I went to a music festival in the heart of Tokyo called TOKYO CALLING. Over 300(!!!) groups performed over the three-day festival, many with no more than a dozen people in the audience. Here are some songs from my favorite performances I saw there. 

Of all the artists I’ve talked about that I saw at TOKYO CALLING, Hayashi Aozora is perhaps the most emblematic of the festival. While I wrote about mostly bigger groups who drew crowds of a hundred or more, I think there were around 10 people who came to her performance. She wasn’t discouraged by this, though. Quite the opposite, actually, she repeatedly remarked about how much she enjoyed performing in concert venues (instead of cafes or street corners, I suppose). She also happened to deliver one of my favorite performances of the festival, just a girl and a guitar on stage. She has a great voice, and her playing was all the more endearing in such an intimate atmosphere. You feel special when you make eye contact with the person performing on stage, but at this concert, that was happening basically every song.

While I couldn’t tell you if she performed this song during the 30-minute timeslot, it’s reflective of the type of music she played, evocative ballads with great vocals – though she had a few upbeat tracks in there as well. I’m almost sad because I’ll probably never have the opportunity to see her perform live again. Maybe that’s a good thing, though, because if I saw her perform again, I’d more than likely just fall in love with her.

In September, I went to a music festival in the heart of Tokyo called TOKYO CALLING. Over 300(!!!) groups performed over the three-day festival, many with no more than a dozen people in the audience. Here are some songs from my favorite performances I saw there. 

MOSHIMO was one of the bands I went to in order to kill some time. You know, when you go to a festival and there’s an hour between bands you actually want to see, so you stop off by one you’ve maybe vaguely heard of. Moshimo was one of those bands for me. I’d heard a song off of a youtube recommendation, maybe, but that’s about as far as my fandom went. They hadn’t really clicked for me. That changed after seeing them live. As soon as they came on stage, I was hooked. For starters, their sound check song was Shots by LMFAO, and if you can get a crowd of 500 Japanese indie-rock fans screaming “Shots” at 1 pm on a Monday, you’ve already earned a “great live band” designation from me.

The show that followed lived up to the expectations set by the sound check. Moshimo played Loud, high energy rock that effortlessly bounced between heavy and poppy and was a delight to listen to. Their music has an addictive flow to it, and I found myself smiling as they seamlessly jumped from verse to chorus to solo without a breath between. They also showed good humor at technical difficulties, air-guitaring when a guitar had to be replaced due to malfunction. They closed with a pair of bangers that have become regular listens for me whenever I’m in the mood for some up-beat rock.

This song was the second to last they played, and it was probably my favorite performed live. The heavier moments, while lackluster in the studio version, hit harder during the live performance, and they added moments of audience participation that were charming and added to the experience. The title of this song, 吾輩は虎である（I am a tiger) is a play on the title of a famous book by Natsume Soseki, one of the best regarded Japanese authors of all time, called 吾輩は猫である（I am a cat）. Despite its literary origins, the song is actually fairly mundane and silly. Here, I’ll translate the first bit to illustrate this:

吾輩は虎である I am a tiger
鋭い牙もある with sharp fangs
かわいい猫ガール but I’m not some kind of
そうなんじゃないけど cute cat girl

Still, it’s a fun little song, especially if you can get over the shrillness of the singer’s voice. I’m glad I decided to attend this performance, because it really warmed me up to the band.

In September, I went to a music festival in the heart of Tokyo called TOKYO CALLING. Over 300(!!!) groups performed over the three-day festival, many with no more than a dozen people in the audience. Here are some songs from my favorite performances I saw there. 

If you like hectic, syncopated, upbeat rock, you’ll like Bentham. There’s a great energy to their music, and between the strong vocals and shredded guitar riffs, you can tell they’re all brilliant musicians. At the live performance, though, one in particular stood out, and that is the bassist. The dude is a freak of nature. There’s not too much to say about this performance. The crowd was maybe a hundred people. It was loud, energetic, and an absolute blast, just like you’d expect from any rock concert.

This song was the first that I liked by the band, and with its heavy use of syncopation; hard-rocking, catchy chorus, and killer guitar riffs, I think it’s pretty representative of the band.

In September, I went to a music festival in the heart of Tokyo called TOKYO CALLING. Over 300(!!!) groups performed over the three-day festival, many with no more than a dozen people in the audience. Here are some songs from my favorite performances I saw there. 

Of all the groups I saw at TOKYO CALLLING, I almost want to recommend Unchain the most. Their music has wide appeal, with its jazzy production, great vocals, and bright melodies. They’re veterans at performing live as well, commenting that they’d been going at it for 20(or maybe it was 30?) years during the show. It was a fun performance, and it showcased how talented their musicians are.

I don’t remember if they played this song live(it’s hard to identify the songs when you can only understand a third of the lyrics), but this is one of my favorites by them. It’s catchy all the way through, from the bass riff to the chorus, and I find it hard not to bob my head along as they shout “Rainy Dance Floor” at me.

In September, I went to a music festival in the heart of Tokyo called TOKYO CALLING. Over 300(!!!) groups performed over the three-day festival, many with no more than a dozen people in the audience. Here are some songs from my favorite performances I saw there. 

水流のロック　－　日食なつこ

Have you ever found an artist that you listen to one song by them and you think, “Damn, that’s a good song, I wonder if any others are good?” and then you listen to another one and you’re like, “Oh wow, two for two! Let’s see how far this goes!” and the good songs just keep coming? That’s what Nisshoku Natsuko was for me. The first time I listened to her music, I went through all 10 of her most played songs on Spotify and loved all of them. As such, I was elated when I saw her on the schedule for TOKYO CALLING and made it top priority to go and see her.

This song checks all the boxes for me. It’s jazzy, up-beat, full of emotive vocals, and beautiful in its simplicity. Piano, drums, vocals, that’s all Nisshoku Natsuko needs to write a song that slaps. In the live performance, it was even more stripped down. She performed alone, with no backing drums. She had a presence on stage that made everyone in the room aware of just how talented she was, warming up in the style of a classical pianist and fielding requests for her sound-check song. Where many bands use the volume of a live show to cover for inadequacy, the simplicity of her setup didn’t allow for that. Raw piano and vocals, nothing to cover up any misplays or voice cracks. It was a spectacular performance. I purchased a shirt after the show was over, one of the two that I bought during the festival.

In September, I went to a music festival in the heart of Tokyo called TOKYO CALLING. Over 300(!!!) groups performed over the three-day festival, many with no more than a dozen people in the audience. Here are some songs from my favorite performances I saw there. 

アニー　－　ズーカラデル

This might be my favorite Japanese song. It has the perfect combination of imperfect, emotive, raw vocals; catchy instrumentals; and a chorus that hits with a sublime emotional high. It’s a great song. The lyrics are cute and catchy, singing about an imperfect love, and even though it is difficult for me to understand them all the way through, I feel the emotion, and I love it.

I saw this group live on the third and final day of the festival. The final day had the more popular acts with the larger venues in Shinjuku. The performance was great, and they closed with this song. It didn’t quite have the remarkable energy of Necry Talkie’s performance from the day before, but it more than lived up to my expectations. This show was crowded enough, with a few hundred in the audience, including, believe it or not, the Guitarist and Vocalist from Necry Talkie! After working up the nerves to battle through it in Japanese, I briefly spoke to them, awkwardly stumbling through compliments about their performance the day before. I also asked for a picture, and they seemed receptive to the idea, but wanted to wait until after the show as not to be rude to the performers. Unfortunately, as the crowd left the venue, I missed the chance to ask them for a photo, but that’s okay, I didn’t want to bother them anyway. Still, when they blow up, I can say that I saw talked to them in the audience of a concert!

In September, I went to a music festival in the heart of Tokyo called TOKYO CALLING. Over 300(!!!) groups performed over the three-day festival, many with no more than a dozen people in the audience. Here are some songs from my favorite performances I saw there. 

オシャレ大作戦　－　ネクライトーキー

This was the song that inspired me to go to TOKYO CALLING. There’s a bit of a story that led to this, so bear with me for a moment. Since moving to Japan, I’ve made an effort to seek out Japanese music. One of the tools I use to do so is youtube, particularly the related videos function. By happenstance I found this song. The title roughly translates to, “Great Fashion Strategy,” and the lyrics of the song talks about the existential crises of young people – kinda odd. It’s catchy enough that it got stuck in my ear, but I wasn’t quite sure I liked it or not. Indie bubblegum pop-rock can be really hit-or-miss because of how easy it is for poppy productions to sound amateurish. Anyway, I was clicking around to different songs, still on the fence, when I stumbled upon a recently uploaded live video. It shattered my expectations for the band. In their live performances, they added punk rock sensibilities to their poppy sound, with screamed vocals, distorted guitars, and taking things double-time just for the hell of it. It looked so. Damn. Fun. Naturally, I immediately followed the link in the description to their upcoming live shows, booking a ticket to TOKYO CALLING to watch them live on the second day.

They did not disappoint. This song, when compared with their others, had gone moderately viral in the months leading up to TOKYO CALLING, so the venue that had been booked for the band was way too small. It was the only packed show I went to at the festival, and the energy in the room was unreal. They bounced from track to track, throwing in distorted, aggressive variations of their studio recordings. Finally, they closed with this track and the room went wild. After the show I bought a wrist band, and later on in the festival I actually ran into members of the band. But that’s a story for another day.