So Much More Than Stacey's Mom: Fountains of Wayne Had it Going On
After getting tossed from Atlantic Records for lack of sales, Fountains of Wayne hit commercial success with "Stacey's Mom" in 2003. The rest of the album is so much better, and here's why.
“‘Stacey’s Mom’ was a blessing and a curse because, without that song, a lot of people wouldn’t know who the band is. But the flip side of that is that half of our audience only knows that song, and they come to hear that song. Then there’s the other half of the audience who are lifetime fans and know every single word, every single deep cut, a lot of times when I don’t even remember it.”
- Chris Collingwood, Fountains of Wayne co-founder
“If you yell “Stacey’s Mom,” you will be removed from the audience.”
- Adam Schlesinger, Fountains of Wayne co-founder at a 2013 concert
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In May 2003, New York band Fountains of Wayne released the power pop single “Stacey’s Mom” ahead of their upcoming album, Welcome Interstate Managers. With an unforgettable guitar riff that echoes The Cars and a horny lyrical tale that was popular at the time thanks to Blink-182 and the American Pie movies, “Stacey’s Mom” became a surprise smash for the band. The song peaked at number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, earned the band two Grammy noms, and the music video starring supermodel Rachel Hunter was an unavoidable MTV staple for the summer.
A Grammy nomination for “Best New Artist” and a number-one spot on Billboard Heatseekers chart placed the band in unchartered territory for success. More often than not, though, the geezers at the Grammys nominate “Best New Artist” as in “New to the Suits,” and Welcome Interstate Managers was the third record for Fountains of Wayne.
As someone comfortably in that half of the band’s fandom that knew their back catalog, I found myself happy for the band’s success while knowing that the rest of Welcome Interstate Managers was so much better than what they had become known for. I’d gotten into them with their self-titled debut album after seeing them perform “Radiation Vibe” and “Sink to the Bottom” on the Jenny McCarthy Show1. Fountains of Wayne’s approach to power pop connected with a kid who couldn’t stop listening to Weezer’s Blue Album, and the 1999 follow-up Utopia Parkway was just as great, but its low sales saw the band dropped from Atlantic’s roster.
So color me surprised when they returned on the much smaller S-Curve Records (also responsible for the ear cancer that is Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out?”), and sales for Welcome Interstate Managers blasted off into the stratosphere. If I have to rank Fountains of Wayne records, they’re the rare instance that I like the albums in order of release. Still, there’s no arguing that Welcome Interstate Managers is their most complete record that paints portraits of middle-class bridge and tunnelers navigating both the suburbs and corporate careers in the city.
S-Curve Records delivered “Mexican Wine” as a follow-up single with diminishing results, yet it’s more illustrative of the quips Collingswood and Schlesinger were capable of (“I used to fly for United Airlines, then I got fired for reading ‘High Times’”). At the same time “Bright Future in Sales” expertly crafts a tale of pulling your shit together after a big night of drinks with the co-workers2. “Little Red Light” comes from the early days of cell phones and waiting for the call you know isn’t coming.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a band that channels the New York metro area experience like Fountains of Wayne was capable of. “Hackensack” daydreams of an old classmate crush who is now a Hollywood star, while the narrator is stuck working a blue-collar job in Jersey (“Now I see your face in, the strangest places, movies and magazines, I saw you talking, To Christopher Walken, on my tv screen”). “Valley Winter Song” takes a detour through Massachusetts, where Collingswood and Schlesinger met in college, and “Fire Island” is about house party debauchery while the parents are gone for a summer weekend.
These days I dread listening to an album with more than twelve songs3, but Welcome Interstate Managers is a rarity where its hour-long runtime is not only a sign of the times of when it was released but there’s also no fat in the record’s seventeen tracks. “All Kinds of Time” brings in Smashing Pumpkins’s James Iha for a slow soaring signature solo, and even when the band throws in a hippie parody (“Peace and Love”) or do their best Oasis imitation on “Supercollider,” it all works out in this scrapbook of character snapshots.
The success of “Stacey’s Mom” is something that Fountains of Wayne struggled with, as the follow-up record Traffic and Weather saw a noticeable drop off in quality4. Chris Collingswood wrestled with alcoholism before getting sober in 2011, and Adam Schlesinger worked with other artists while also co-writing the songs for the Broadway adaptation of Cry Baby.
Unfortunately, there is no happy ending to this story. Collingswood and Schlesinger fought non-stop while making the band’s fifth and final album, Sky Full of Holes, and Fountains of Wayne disbanded with a whimper in 2013. Any hopes of a reunion were canceled when Schlesinger was an early victim of Covid in April 2020. Having worked with Iha in Tinted Windows, indie pop outfit Ivy, and writing “That Thing You Do!” for the eponymous film, amongst so many other ventures, his passing was a massive loss to the songwriting community. Collingswood, guitarist Jody Porter, and drummer Brian Young reunited a few weeks later for a live stream benefit, but like everything from a few years ago, things just weren’t the same.
So in celebration of Mother’s Day, push past “Stacey’s Mom” and give the rest of Welcome Interstate Managers a go. Its early aughts power pop at its finest, and Fountains of Wayne were among the best groups to explore the genre.
Yes, this is real. Thanks to Singled Out, McCarthy ran MTV for a few years in the mid to late 90s. This stupid show is also where I heard Ben Folds Five for the first time, so thanks for that.
A tale as old as time in good ol’ New York City, and one that I wasn’t unfamiliar with during my time there.
MAX!
While still being pretty solid in my re-evaluation of the record after thrifting the CD a few months ago.
Such an amazing album!
"Radiation Vibe" is just sublime. Peak 90s power pop. "Denise," too, for that matter, though it's on Utopia Parkway.
At the risk of going further into the weeds, I'm putting in a vote for Ivy's "Apartment Life" record. Just fantastic all around.