Fountains Of Wayne’s Chris Collingwood always regretted 'Stacy’s Mom'
Chris Collingwood has said he knew Fountains Of Wayne would forever be associated with their “novelty” hit single ‘Stacy’s Mom’ and not for the quality of their other songs.
The former Fountains Of Wayne guitarist was being interviewed in the wake of co-founder Adam Schlesinger’s death from coronavirus complications last week when he addressed the band’s Grammy-nominated 2003 single.
“I tried to talk [Schlesinger] out of ‘Stacy’s Mom,’” Collingwood told Rolling Stone. “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.”
He added that Schlesinger “deserves to be remembered for more than a punch line”, saying: “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,” Collingwood said.
“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.”
Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba tweeted that he was “grasping for the right words” to say. “I knew him best as a mentor and a friend,” he wrote, before imploring that people follow the appropriate lockdown and social distancing measures in order for “lives to be saved”.
