Fountains of Wayne

Fountains of Wayne is an American rock band that formed in New York City in 1995. The band's lineup for the majority of its career was founding members Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger, with Jody Porter and Brian Young who joined after the band's first album. The band, best known for the Grammy-nominated song "Stacy's Mom," released six albums from 1996 to 2011 before effectively disbanding in 2013.

Schlesinger died of complications from COVID-19 on April 1, 2020. The surviving members of Fountains of Wayne played an online benefit concert that month as a tribute to Schlesinger, and reunited again for shows in 2025.

After Montclair, New Jersey-based Adam Schlesinger and Sellersville, Pennsylvania-based Chris Collingwood first met as freshmen at Williams College, they played music in various bands and eventually went their separate ways, with Collingwood forming the Mercy Buckets in Boston and Schlesinger forming Ivy in New York City. In the mid-1990s, they came together to form Fountains of Wayne, named after a lawn ornament store in Wayne, New Jersey that closed in 2009. The store features in an episode of The Sopranos, "Another Toothpick". At first Collingwood hated the name but eventually warmed to it. Previous band names included Wallflowers, Woolly Mammoth, Are You My Mother? and Three Men Who When Standing Side by Side Have a Wingspan of Over Twelve Feet. The band cut a demo and signed with Atlantic Records, then recruited guitarist Jody Porter and still-active Posies drummer Brian Young after recording their debut album. Young got in touch with a friend who worked at Fountains of Wayne's label to see if there were any job openings, and when he auditioned for the band, they asked him to play the beat of "Swingtown" by Steve Miller Band.

Though Collingwood and Schlesinger shared cowriter credit for all original Fountains of Wayne material, for most of their career together, they wrote their songs separately. In 2005 Collingwood said, "We decided early on, it's better to not have arguments that some bands have where someone might say, 'I wrote 15% of that song,' and try to figure out those numbers. It just seems ridiculous." Schlesinger added, "We just agreed many years ago that if we were to have a band we'd just split the songwriting to avoid having a conversation every time we tried to finish a song. But we really haven't collaborated as writers in years. And that's kind of intentional too because we didn't want it to turn into a thing where people would say, 'Adam's songs are like this...' We wanted the band to have an identity more than we wanted each of us to have an identity in the band."

In 1996, the band released its self-titled debut, which spawned the singles "Radiation Vibe" and "Sink to the Bottom", and the band toured the world extensively behind its debut album, playing alongside bands including the Smashing Pumpkins, Sloan, and the Lemonheads. That same year, Schlesinger wrote the Academy Award-nominated, RIAA gold-certified title song for the film That Thing You Do!.

In 1999, the band released Utopia Parkway, an album named after a road in Queens, New York. Some critics described it as a loosely thematic album centered on suburban life. Utopia Parkway received generally positive reviews by critics and was album of the week in People magazine. The group once again toured extensively behind the album. Later in 1999, the band was later dropped by Atlantic.

The band was inactive for a period of time. Collingwood, in particular, had a difficult time coping with the band being dropped by their label. In 2004 he said, "When we got dropped from Atlantic, it's my fault that it took so long, because I wasn't sure I wanted to keep doing it. At the end of four years of the hardest work I'd ever done in my life, more traveling and being away from my wife the whole time, I had nothing to show for it. I got back home and I had nothing. I was broke, I was demoralized, I was exhausted. I think I just needed a year to recharge my batteries."

Schlesinger cowrote many of the songs for the Josie and the Pussycats film and soundtrack, produced albums for Verve Pipe, David Mead, and They Might Be Giants, and released a third record with his other band, Ivy. Collingwood formed and fronted a Northampton, Massachusetts-based pop-country band called Gay Potatoes, and played a string of solo shows in the Boston and Los Angeles areas; Gay Potatoes was officially retired on New Year's Eve 2010. Guitarist Jody Porter worked with his band, The Astrojet, alongside famed producer Gordon Raphael in New York City. Percusionist Brian Young moved to Los Angeles and did session work for various artists such as producer Steve Fisk, Ivy, Heather Duby, and Greg Dulli.