A relaxed beat and catchy guitar riff start the song, and then Collingwood sings the attention-grabbing opening lines: “Are you alone now / Did you lose the monkey / He gave you backaches / And now you slouch.” The distorted guitars kick in when the track gets to the refrain, and Schlesinger joins in singing harmonies. “Radiation Vibe” kicks off the album, a midtempo track with a hell of a chorus. It was all the push I needed to pick up the record. When MTV started playing the first single, “Radiation Vibe”, with some regularity, it turned out to be a pretty great song. Fountains of Wayne were a band that could’ve been marketed directly to music critics.Īs a white male college student who had also grown up in the suburbs and followed pop music criticism pretty closely, I heard the buzz about the band. Pop music criticism at this time was dominated by New York-based print media and primarily populated by white men who had grown up in the suburbs. Even better, they were a pair who grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia (Collingwood) and New York City (Schlesinger) and often wrote lyrics about the lives of people in the suburbs and New York City. The duo of Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger had impeccable pop music chops and wrote songs that were catchy and fun without being outright wacky.
In retrospect, it’s not a big surprise that Fountains of Wayne was so impactful with music critics of the mid-’90s. Their first release, though, was an instant success with music critics, who lauded the band’s songwriting skill and 1960s and 1970s-inspired power-pop style. Today, the band are best remembered for their biggest hit, “Stacy’s Mom”, from 2003’s Welcome Interstate Managers.
Fountains of Wayne‘s self-titled debut has its 25th anniversary this week, and it seems like a good time to revisit the record.
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