thoughts & Feelings

adam schlesinger

He had a way of making the ordinary extraordinary, the mundanities of everyday life elevated to moments of reckoning in his hands. Turned into rock bottoms and dreams come all the way true. The working stiff with a drinking problem, the kid who never got out of their hometown. Long distance lovers. Adolescent idiots. The fuckup, gearing up to take one last shot.

It’s hard to think of a band whose mention could create a more immediate kinship between two people—if someone else loved Fountains of Wayne they were instantly cool, instantly smart, they got it.

A few months ago I walked by a house in Glassell Park and could hear a band in the garage ripping through Bright Future in Sales—and I just stood there, torn between going to knock on the door or going to the babysitting job I was already late for. I even, for a silly moment, wondered if it could be Adam himself in there. I thought of my mom driving me home from school, rolling her eyes and laughing as I sang along to that song, a tween girl, “seven scotch and sodas at the office party, now I don’t remember where I’m from.” I decided just to listen, and be late by a minute or two more.

He could move seamlessly between laugh-out-loud funny and gut-punching sadness; he could live inside the two at once. He had a way of stretching a moment to infinity. He was so smart and he put it all on the line. He was rare. His voice itself, that nasal, spot-on, expressive, understated voice. You could find it in a late-nineties early-aughts time capsule for how distinctly it evokes that moment. Gentle or searing. Hovering on either side of the millennium. For me, a moment of endless possibility, the excitement of finally knowing myself, the expanse of my dreams out in front of me. The voice of a guy who was perfectly himself. The type of guy I’ll always fall for, written into my swooning preteen DNA. And for good reason. For something real, underneath.

This type of shit felt custom made for me. A kid too smart for her own good who couldn’t help but want everyone to know. A kid who wanted to prove herself. I think this hit me so hard because the ten-year-old girl in me is scarcely able to imagine this loss. I fell in love with Fountains of Wayne when I loved music the most. When I didn’t know how good I had it, that there were bands like them out there doing that, for me. I didn’t know it wouldn’t last forever. And I can’t go back. But I can listen to the songs, and get pretty close.

As a teenager trying and largely failing to become a guitar player, I found some solace in Adam’s songs, ‘cause there were some truly great ones I could actually play. Like John Prine and Jackson Browne, he didn’t need to be fancy to get his point across. But Adam could be fancy when he wanted. He was the type of guy who just had it all at his fingertips. And this man didn’t give a fuck about genre. This man just had the eye and ear and heart to put it all together, out of whatever pieces interested him. He knew how to write a song that made you feel like you’d known it forever. It’s gotta be fate that somehow the guy who ended up writing That Thing You Do was the one guy most perfectly suited to the job. To write a song in 1995 that you could believe was a smash hit in the 60s—a daunting task for any great songwriter. He took it on, and accomplished it, quietly, coolly, gracefully, ‘cause he was the real deal. He time traveled all of us. Made us remember, fondly, things that never even happened.

So much I didn’t know till today. I never knew he’d written for Music and Lyrics, a movie truly blessed to have his songs. I bought the soundtrack in 2007, learned them all. I never knew he was helping me through a breakup in my early twenties, as I binge-watched Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and took comfort in the songs he wrote, about unbridled love and crashing and burning and trying to be better. I wasn’t aware until his death of the breadth of his work beyond FOW—and I couldn’t be less surprised that the man was basically headed straight for an EGOT. It’s clear he always had it in him. Not really involved in the cult of celebrity. Just a man building a life out of music. 

He told the world that all the guts and viscera that life has to offer are there to be found even in the midst of the smallest seeming reality. In suburban ennui or city sadness. Like Springsteen, a fellow Jersey boy, he made it undeniably clear that the greatest and lowest stretches of the human experience are available to anyone, anywhere. Even a teenage kid with a fat crush on a classmate’s mom. A teenage kid hopelessly in love with an older woman, convinced he could carry the torch left behind by a deadbeat dad. A big joke, but also, not at all. It’s poignant, sweet, and funny as hell, like so much of what Adam gave to the world. He knew how to put his heart into a song. He knew how to make something that could take your breath away before you realized it was gone. Caught in a laugh and a moment from tears. There’s not a lot of people out there who have it—and Adam fucking had it. And he gave it to us.

For me, middle school was Stacy’s Mom. The legend was elevated in my hometown because a girl we knew played Stacy in the music video. High school was Hey Julie, a song about a girl getting a guy through his shitty 9-5 just by being his. I think of Flora and I, maybe sophomore year, singing and laughing through it at coffee house in the library, one of the few times I ever got the courage to play guitar on stage. “He’s got me running round the office like a gerbil on a wheel / he can tell me what to do but he can’t tell me what to feel.” In college it was Hackensack, a song about pining for the one that got away, the one that went to pursue her dreams. “I see your face in the strangest places, movies and magazines / I saw you talkin’ to Christopher Walken on my TV screen.” A song about staying put and promising to wait, forever.

The last couple years it’s been All Kinds of Time. A song about a quarterback. One of those infinity songs. A whole life, contained in an instant. A song about the pressure of performance and the expectations of love, about stepping up to the plate with everything you have and hoping, in a silent private moment, that you won’t blow it. I’ve been listening to it all week. I put it on a quarantine playlist for Flora, track four, right after Jackson and Joni. I thought it would seem like a funny segue until you actually heard it. “He thinks of his mother, he thinks of his bride-to-be / he thinks of his father, his two younger brothers, gathered around the widescreen TV.” He’s got all kinds of time. 

The only time I ever really wanted a fake ID was for a FOW show when I was 19. I never got the chance to see them. Wish I had. I’m a sucker for a good story. And Adam had them, in droves. He was an unsung hero with a funny band name and a seventh grade anthem for his biggest hit. If nothing else, I’m thankful his song is sung today. I’m thankful that I got to go on a run hours after hearing the news, and listen to Adam in my headphones in the dark, and stop every once in a while and cry. Felt like something out of a teen movie. I think he’d approve.

Never has a band made me feel so understood. And I’m so happy to have had him, for the time I did, to have found him when I needed him the most. And then to keep finding him, again and again, when I kept on needing him along the way. I expect I’ll go on like that forever. And that’s something that just doesn’t come around every day. It really doesn’t. He’s the type of artist that inspires you not to waste your potential. 

And then, he gave me the gift of the thought—maybe even if I fail, there could be glory in that too. Maybe there could be glory in a life I lived just as best as I could. 

I’ll be listening. Forever.

bite by lou roy - premiere

how do we reckon with those difficult feelings we can barely articulate?

the best songs do this work for us. and so they stick.

“bite” by lou roy has stuck with me, since first listen. there is a kind of work of art i find most powerful at this moment in my life, in my burgeoning adulthood so saturated with self-awareness and yet so shrouded in mysteries of hurt and longing. the work i come back to again and again and turn over and over in my mind is work that points to something inside me i’ve been looking for without even quite knowing it was there. a moment of identification. a gentle index finger to the chest. an unexpected mirror in an unfamiliar place. 

we look inward to find clues, far enough along in the 21st century that we feel a duty to ourselves and to others to unearth the roots of the ways we cause pain. the ways we feel pain, too. we always hurt the ones we love, and so we hurt ourselves.

“bite” speaks of love and lashing out, of vulnerability and violence, of the wounds that run through the bottom of everything, and of goodwill, perhaps, above all. there is accountability, ownership, passion, apology. tenderness, like a bruise or a kiss. an as yet unasked question, a kind of gentle good faith. an unexpected optimism, fragile but grounded like a seed in soil.

a thought that maybe even in laying bare the worst in ourselves, we can still ask for love.

and it’ll be given.

https://open.spotify.com/album/48aFV8ITVEtoktd7rsuLKJ?si=0b8Ch9_hQs-WdWqZarMvQw

woolsey fire 2018

This isn’t my house anymore. We moved out just after I graduated high school, end of June, 2011. Then we moved again. We are so lucky that our current home didn’t burn down, we didn’t lose our belongings. Random, dumb luck. I am so sorry to those who lost their homes. I can only imagine. This isn’t that. I just want to get some stuff out. I think for people who move around a lot, there’s one place that comes along and fills that space inside us, becomes the place we feel is home even after we leave. This house was My House. I just want to take a moment to honor it. To remember the place I grew up. Where I was a passionate and insecure teenager. Where I fell in love for the first time. Where my dad rigged up a skeleton on a pulley every Halloween to scare the shit out of the neighborhood kids and then run out, laughing, to greet them. My bedroom walls fully covered in magazine collages, black and white music posters on the ceiling even, looking down at me as I slept. Staying up till 3AM on AIM, reading Harry Potter, writing in my notebook. Woken up by friends dragging me out of bed at noon. Spongebob sheets. Ladder to my little loft, lights controlled by clapper. Horror movies. Lord of the Rings and Lost marathons. My brother bringing home 4 pints of Ben & Jerrys at a time. Sick days where my mom left work to drop by with my requested movie rentals from Zuma Video. Always making my sister late for first period. Friends on the couch and around the kitchen table. Sound of the frogs in the creek chirping softly all night. Lying on the lawn in the sun with lemon juice in dirty blonde hair. Sneaking out at night to do nothing worse than wander around the neighborhood, lie on the pavement and look at the stars. Jumping on my bike or my skateboard to rush to the Hayes house, to Flora’s, Micaela’s, Erica’s, to the beach. Baby grand in the corner. Little paw prints embedded in the entryway tile. Unlocked front door. My house. Forever. Before I had a smartphone, tragically few photos to remember it by. My heart broke when we moved out. But a piece of my heart has lived there since before I had any understanding of what my life could be. And it still does. Always will.