When my boys were young, we listened to the Fountains of Wayne a lot. Like the Ramones, they were one of our family bands: music we played on car trips, music that made all of us cheerful. The Fountains of Wayne wrote sugar-pop hooks about lonely office guys in New Jersey, about a young quarterback imagining his dad watching him on TV, about a kid falling in calf love with his friend's mom. The harmonies were tight; the lyrics were both comic and sad. I taught Fountains of Wayne songs to school kids, back in the days when I was an elementary school music teacher, and my students loved them.
Yesterday coronavirus killed Adam Schlesinger, one of the band's founders and songwriters, who had since made a career as a songwriter on Broadway. He was 52. In his honor, Paul played the Fountains of Wayne album Welcome Interstate Managers as we ate dinner. We sang along with our mouths full. We knew all of the words.
I bought that album at the Borders in Bangor, in about 2004. The boys would have been 7 and 10 years old. Both were with me, and we were excited. When we got back to the car, James unwrapped the CD and stuck it into the stereo, and the song "Mexican Wine" came on . . . a slow ballad intro, the surprising lamenting lyrics: "He was killed in a cellular phone explosion. . . . " And then the intro dropped into a sudden grind of guitar, the song exploded, and all three of us instantly went crazy. We'd been sucked into that old irresistible rock-and-roll joy, and we played the CD over and over again, at top volume, for the hour-plus ride home.
I would never list the Fountains of Wayne among my top bands of all time. I reserve that for the Clash, for Bruce Springsteen, for the Band, for the Pretenders, for James Brown (this is an impossible list to finish). But every time I hear their songs, I'm dialed back into moments of pure sweetness: when being with my boys transcended "I'm your mother/you're my children" . . . when we were just friends soaked in a shared rainstorm of delight. We were singing the songs. We were waiting for the bridge.
3 comments:
1990s: the morning ride to school with an angsty teenage daughter: "Blue" by Joni Mitchell.
Sweet sad harmonies
2019: windy country road with a newly turned teen grandson: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.
Sweet joyous harmonies
Singing can express all those things that awkward conversations can't.
Do people still sing together in the car?
My younger son and I do!
It'd be hard to get down a deeply felt memory better than you've done it here. "We were singing the songs. We were waiting for the bridge." The heart moves.
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