Fountains Of Wayne Singer Hates That ‘Stacy’s Mom’ Is Adam Schlesinger’s Biggest Legacy

Fountains Of Wayne singer Chris Collingwood has remembered band co-founder and songwriter Adam Schlesinger, who passed away from COVID-19 complications at the beginning of April, in an interview with Rolling Stone. In it, he reveals he never wanted ‘Stacy’s Mom’ to be released, as he knew it would become Schlesinger’s legacy.

Across his career, the 52-year-old Schlesinger did much more than ‘Stacy’s Mom’, Fountain Of Wayne’s biggest hit. The multi-award-winning artist had several side-project bands, produced for the likes of The Monkees, Robert Plant and They Might Be Giants, and composed music for Broadway musical Cry Baby, as well as countless films and tv shows.

Most recently, he was executive music producer on musical sitcom Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which he won an Emmy for (and we called one of the last decade’s most defining TV shows). Following his death on April 1 in a New York hospital, tributes poured out online — now, in a chat with Rolling Stone, Collingwood says that Schlesinger was “too good” to have a novelty song like ‘Stacy’s Mom’ be his “calling card”.

Collingwood says that even at time of recording, he tried to get the band to bin the track, knowing it’d overshadow Schlesinger’s song-writing talents. He says:

“I tried to talk him out of ‘Stacy’s Mom’. I could see exactly what was going to happen, and when it started happening in slow motion it just felt inevitable. He was too good a writer to have that be his calling card, and the success of a novelty song means that’s just what you are to the public, from that moment on forever. It’s sad to me that people reading his obituary will all know that song, and only a very tiny percentage of them will ever hear ‘I-95’ or ‘The Girl I Can’t Forget’.

“I was reluctant to [record] it at all, but in the moment you don’t want to kill the session by not being a good sport. There were other things we did, kind of joking around, that we would put out as a B-side or whatever. When it was done, I didn’t think it belonged on the album. Even on a record that was stylistically all over the place, that song didn’t fit in. It sounded like a different band.

“I knew it would be a single, and I knew it would be a hit, and everyone else knew it too. But I was the only one who didn’t think a novelty hit was a good thing.

It’s like being able to tell a really good story — like ‘Fire Island’, which he wrote for that album — but deciding instead to tell a joke and jump off stage. He deserves to be remembered for more than a punch line.”

If you’d like to dive into Schlesinger’s career and work, Rolling Stone’s obituary is an excellent place to start. Listen to ‘The Girl I Can’t Forget’ and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend‘s ‘Anti-Depressants Are So Not A Big Deal’, for which Schlesinger won an Emmy, below.