If I had to name Fountains of Wayne’s best album, I’d be torn between Utopia Parkway and 2003’s Welcome Interstate Managers. Utopia Parkway is a more focused and consistent album, but many of the songs on Welcome Interstate Managers are the band’s best yet.
Managers is one of those cases, more prevalent these days it seems, of an album where less is more. It is a really good album at 16 songs. At 12 it would be amazing. The first six songs fly by in a burst of creativity and craftsmanship but things start to fall apart a few songs after that. Everything here is good but they needed an editor. Of course, in the MP3 era we can all be editors, and it’s easy enough to re-sequence the album as an iTunes playlist.
I interrupt the previously scheduled Elvis Costello appreciation to bring you a week of unrelated songs. I figure I’ll give a break to the non-Costello fans in the audience (what’s wrong with you people?) and come back to him next week.
A couple of weeks back I featured a group of “happy” songs that were purposefully shallow and innocuous. But I didn’t mean to imply that I find no value in light songs. On the contrary, a well-written upbeat pop song can be the best thing in the world. And today’s song is perhaps the ultimate example.
Fountains of Wayne is one of my happiest discoveries in recent years (actually, it’s not so recent… I first heard them in 2000).
It was the song ‘Denise’ from the Utopia Parkway album that caught my attention. It was on a sampler CD in an indie music magazine and I loved it instantly. For some reason, I thought FOW was a Christian rock band… maybe I was confusing them with Jars of Clay. So it was a happy surprise to learn they were actually fierce, clever ironists with a great sense of humor and a knack for killer hooks.