Ivy/Fountains of Wayne Press Archives

[Ivy: Long Distance Review from Popmatters, July 23, 2001]
[Ivy: No 'Distance' Too Far, Nude As The News, July 11, 2001]
[Ivy: No 'Distance' Too Long, Billboard, July 14, 2001]
[Ivy: The Slow Rise of Ivy, Hearsay, June 14, 2001]
[Ivy: Baby Sue Long Distance Review, June 1, 2001]
[Ivy: Ivy Lines Up Acoustic Gigs, Billboard.com, May 29, 2001]
[FOW: New Musical Express live review, May 15, 1999]
[FOW: The Washington City Paper Review of Utopia Parkway, April 30, 1999]
[Ivy: Apartment Life Review from New Musical Express: April, 1999]
[FOW: Katherine Michel, Adam Schlesinger: Vows, February 14, 1999]
[Ivy: Chicago Tribune Review of Ivy & Komeda, June, 1998]
[FOW: New Musical Express, May 10, 1997]
[FOW: New Musical Express, March 1997]
[FOW: Rolling Stone, November 28, 1996]
[FOW: College Music Journal, Summer, 1996]
[Adam: Siskel & Ebert Explain Why "That Thing You Do!" Deserves An Oscar]

By taking smoothness to shocking new heights in just three records, New York rock trio Ivy has evolved from an indie rock group into something quite different. The band's first record, Realistic, was largely a skillful homage to synthpop as performed by a guitar band and mixed by alternaproducer du jour Andy Wallace. Then suddenly with 1997's Apartment Life, guitarist Andy Chase seized control of production and the band found its niche. Sound became as important as songwriting, even inseparable from it. Though less overtly poppy, this new approach yielded better commercial results. When two songs from Apartment Life, "This Is the Day" and "I've Got a Feeling", were featured in the film There's Something About Mary, Ivy began to get noticed.

Long Distance is Ivy's first record since Apartment Life and it's being released on an independent label. Clearly the big boys upstairs didn't think Ivy was mainstream enough. And they do have a point. For a band that few people would term strange or experimental, Ivy has very few peers. Perhaps the only band currently mining similar territory is Stereolab. Both bands have French, female lead singers, but mutual francophonic femininity isn't the only thing they have in common. Like Stereolab, Ivy uses eighties pop as a reference point, then moves beyond it, neither disguising nor fetishizing its influences. But unlike Stereolab, Ivy chooses to work almost exclusively within the context of traditional rock songs. While Stereolab creates art rock or dance music, Ivy is, at least nominally, a rock band. The result is rock songs that aren't what they appear to be. At first listen, the melodies on Long Distance sound too simplistic to sustain an entire song - and yet they do. The secret is that the melodies and chords are only half the story. The aura the songs create is as important as the songs themselves. Like Stereolab, Ivy is largely about sound; they just hide it better.

But if sound is the key to Ivy, describing the Ivy Sound is tricky. Above all, it's polished. Warm, full and lush too. "At once futuristic and nostalgic" is pretentious, but also true. Yet within the enigmatic whole, there are individual strengths that are essential. Bassist Adam Schlesinger, who also has a successful career as half of Fountains of Wayne and writes songs for movies like Josie and the Pussycats and That Thing You Do, is the band's secret weapon. His bass lines are understated and mixed low but provide much of the music's melodic tension. Singer Dominique Durand sings flat and stylish, doing as much by not doing as by doing. The other roles in the band are less clear. On the one hand, Ivy must be a collaborative effort because it's doubtful that someone as talented as Schlesinger doesn't lend a hand in the studio. On the other hand, a band as focused as Ivy needs a driving force because only the bizarro passion of a lone visionary could account for such devotion to a particular sound. Andy Chase is clearly the man with the vision, but much of the credit is shared with his talented band mates.

Viewed alone, Long Distance is a solid pop record. But as part of the evolution of Ivy, it represents something more: another step in an experiment to determine just how sonically wistful pop music can be. Long Distance isn't an improvement on or a step back from Apartment Life so much as a restatement of purpose. Whether Ivy can continue the experiment much longer - and whether it should - remains to be seen. For now, fans can embrace Long Distance as the latest and greatest expression of one band's affection for it's own smoothed-out muse. No one else is doing music like this. And if they were, they wouldn't be doing it this well.

July 11, 2001
No 'Distance' Too Far
By Jonathan Cohen
From Nude As The News

And you thought your band had it bad! New York-based trio Ivy has been dropped from not one, but two major labels, watched their recording studio burn to the ground and their lease on what was left of the property terminated. They've suffered through every music industry indignity imaginable, but have still managed to release two ear-pleasing albums and an EP full of lush indie pop, marked by French vocalist Dominique Durand's sensual singing. But the band faced its biggest roadblock to date last summer, when it was dropped by Sony/550 while working on Long Distance, intended to be Ivy's label debut.

Through some reliable connections and a few strokes of good luck, Long Distance was released in Japan last fall and generated a huge response. It also helped Ivy pop back on the radar screens of
American labels, including Nettwerk, who released the new album this week and plans to re-release Ivy's first two albums (1995's Realistic and 1997's Apartment Life) in mid-September.

Looking back, even Ivy's membership (which also includes multi-instrumentalists Andy Chase -- Durand's husband -- and Adam Schlesinger) struggles to recall all the ups-and-downs. In the
meantime, NATN Associate Editor Jonathan Cohen tries to piece it all together.

NATN: O.K. Let's start a ways back. I'm wondering what exactly happened with Atlantic. Apartment Life was pushed back from its original release date if I'm not mistaken.

Dominique Durand: Well, first of all, with Ivy it seems like we're putting out albums every three or four years. But in fact, we make records pretty fast. Every two years a record is made, but then it takes two years just to put it out! It seems like that's been our way, but it's not really our fault. Apartment Life was done and it was supposed to be released on Atlantic...

Andy Chase: It's the same story every band has to grapple with, which is trying to fit onto the insane release schedule of a major label. It's funny because you can talk yourself out of all 12 months. You
can't do it in July because school is out and you'll miss college. Everybody is releasing records in September, you've got the September crunch. October is too close to November, which starts the Christmas stuff. Before you know it, you're back to June and July again. That's what we went through. They just picked some date which I think was seven months after we turned in the record.

NATN: When did it actually come out?

DD: I don't even remember.

AC: You know what? We got dropped on the first day of the first tour for that record. When did you think it was?

NATN: I think July or August of 1997.

AC: I think you're right. My memory is that we toured fairly soon after it came out and we were dropped fairly soon after that [laughs].

NATN: What actually happens in those situations? Does the tour support dry up right then and there?

DD: Well, what happens is, when you're on a major label, your album comes out, they send a single to radio, and basically if the song doesn't stick, they send you on tour because that's the next step.
They gave us the money to tour, and we're actually a pretty expensive band to send on tour. We continued to tour, which was a seven-week tour with the Space Monkeys. It was awful. But we did the tour. In the middle of that, our management company found us a deal with Sony/550. There was one guy there who really liked our record.

AC: We had a feeling it wasn't going to go well at Atlantic. I thought we had a smart marketing plan presented for us, which made sense to us as artists. Instead of trying to compete with the formulaic pop songs on commercial alternative radio -- we feel outside of that whole genre somewhat -- market us toward adult contemporary or anything other than alternative radio. We had some songs on the album that were less alternative, like "I've Got A Feeling." The point isn't which format. People were saying that if you throw Ivy against matchbox twenty, they're going to lose. But if
you take Ivy to another format, it may stand a better chance. But it's more risky. They decided to go with "The Best Thing," which is as alternative rock as Ivy gets. Even though it was a decent song,
people have to hear that 20 times before it has the same visceral impact as a matchbox twenty song has on the first listen. Like Dominique said, as soon as it didn't do well at radio, within a month, the wind was taken out of the label's sails.

DD: And when you're on a major label, everyone has to be on your side. At Atlantic, we had a lot of friends. But it was not enough.

AC: A band like us needs champions, because if given the exact same treatment as all the other bands, we're at a disadvantage because of the kind of music that we're making, in the climate in the United States. So we need extra kid gloves to kind of maneuver us out front. It's rare when that happens at a label, and we didn't have that at Atlantic, unfortunately.

NATN: So Sony jumps on board to re-release Apartment Life.

DD: I don't even know if we can talk about it! Again, the guy who signed us really liked us, but he didn't play our record to the other people at Sony. When the record came out, people wondered who Ivy was! They decided not to push it. They just re-released it, but we didn't even go on tour.

AC: There were all kinds of weird things. Right before the re-release, a lot of Atlantic versions of Apartment Life found their way back into stores. So all the sudden it became even more difficult,
because Sony had to sell that much more Atlantic product before they could even get to the Sony versions. That was a problem. Also what Dominique said, which was that some people at Sony had never even been informed that they were re-releasing Apartment Life. They didn't know us. It was like, "what? this has already been out! Ivy who?"

DD: Well, then, they were like, "let's forget about Apartment Life, and do another record," which we were very excited about it. So we went back to the studio to begin Long Distance.

AC: Well, even before it, you were pregnant when we started tracking. Then we had to stop because she was, after one take, she was turning blue and getting dizzy!

NATN: Where are we chronologically at this point?

AC: [laughs hard] We're at June of 1999. The record came out again in the fall of 1998. By winter of `98 and into `99, Sony was saying, "well oops, nothing happened, why don't you guys go work on a new record." By June `99, we were in the studio, but Dominique was pregnant.

DD: But nobody knew! We didn't even tell the people at Sony.

AC: We were so scared.

DD: Can you believe that? It's really horrible, isn't it? I was so scared of meeting these people on the street in New York. The guy who signed us found out and was totally fine. But anyway, we were
recording the album, and in the middle of it.

AC: Wait, you missed the fire, though.

DD: Oh, right. Go ahead.

AC: Our studio where we were recording burned down. We were above a place called Dizzy Izzy's, at 14th and 9th Avenue. That's where I'd owned a studio called Stratosphere. I had re-opened with two new partners: James Iha from the Pumpkins, and Adam [Schlesinger] from Ivy. I had owned a studio for 10 years before that, but I bought out my partners and re-opened with Adam and James. Ivy was one of the first clients when we re-opened, and we were in there that summer. To make a long story short, the building was condemned because it was so badly charred. The landlord used this clause in the lease which says in catastrophic fires, you can terminate all the leases. So he kicked us out! Everyone in the building lost their lease. We thought for a while that our master tapes had been destroyed.

NATN: So you know you're dropped at this point?

DD: No, not yet. So, I had the baby in July. That's when we found out the studio burned down. This was in the middle of making the record. After all this bad news, we took some of the equipment and brought it to our place, and that's where we recorded. We did it at home. It was really convenient for me, because I had a little newborn. Towards the end of recording, we found out that we got dropped. They hadn't even heard the record. This is around January of 2000. They dropped I
think 16 bands that week for economic reasons, I think. We thought, okay, well, we got dropped again, that's not new to us, but we didn't want them to own the record. We would have worked for one year for nothing. But we were so lucky. Sony was really nice and gave us back the record, and the old records.

AC: We got the money from Sony, made a record we absolutely loved, became free agents, and got our entire back catalog with the freedom to do whatever we want.

NATN: Wait. We have missed the whole interesting period when "This Is The Day" was getting some exposure from its appearance in "There's Something About Mary" soundtrack.

Adam Schlesinger: You know, I'm not very good with the exact time period, but as I recall, that was sort of in the gap. We were on tour, found out we got dropped, and we still had seven weeks to go
realizing we didn't have label supporting it. The song had already been licensed to that movie at that point, but it wasn't out yet. We started talking with Sony, signed the deal, and we were trying to
come up with some way to take advantage of the song being in the movie. But Sony's re-release of Apartment Life wasn't scheduled until the fall, so it just didn't come together. One idea Sony threw at us was sending a mix of "This Is The Day" to top-40 radio with dialogue from the movie actually edited into the song, a la Bruce Springsteen with "Jerry Maguire." Our initial reaction was no way, but our managers convinced us that even if anyone heard it on the radio, they wouldn't assume we had anything to do with it anyway. So we said what the hell, but after all that, Sony decided not to bother. By the time the album was re-released, the movie was out of theaters. We weren't able to make too much of that.

NATN: So the studio burnt down. What happened next?

DD: For a long time we discussed what we should do. We weren't even trying to go to another major label, even if someone gave us an amazing offer. We had some friends in Japan. We always felt that Ivy should have a career in Japan, because we never had a proper release in Japan. The Japanese are much more open-minded to the kind of pop music we make. We had one connection at EastWest.

AC: Which, coincidentally is an Atlantic subsidiary. I just love the irony in that.

DD: She loved our record and told us she was going to put it out. We licensed the record to them. It came out in October of 2000.

AC: Strangely, in a vacuum, because we hadn't licensed it anywhere else, so there was no support from the rest of the world.

DD: But the timing was perfect, because Andy had produced an album by the band Tahiti 80, which was extremely successful in Japan. We went to Japan and opened for them on tour. We were playing in front of 2,000 people, and our record did really well.

AC: Without any help from the rest of the world. It kind of vindicated us from all the years we were literally making press clippings of interviews and reports about the Cardigans, and having press clippings stapled next to them where we'd do interviews and people would compare us to the Cardigans.

AS: It was a very satisfying experience for us because for years we'd been trying to get our various labels to pay special attention to Japan. We always had an instinct that it would be a good market for Ivy. To see it actually have some success there made us feel good.

DD: I remember one day when we were at Atlantic's international office and I mentioned this, the guy said, "well, okay, but you better dye your hair blonde!" I always remember that. It was so strange. Anyway, we got back to New York very excited about what was happening in Japan. Someone at Nettwerk got our CD, but I don't know how.

AC: You know what, here's again the irony. It keeps going back to Atlantic, strangely enough. Our friends from Atlantic -- Adam Abramson and Bobbi Gale -- both said they thought Nettwerk would be a good fit for us. They got a tape to Nettwerk.

DD: Nettwerk came back and said they really liked the record, which was fantastic. They're an indie label and they seem to understand our kind of music. They're not into supporting just one single.

AC: They're actually shying away from going to radio too soon, because it's human nature to have the momentum sucked out of you when you have a little defeat here and there. All the ideas they've come up with so far are the kinds of things we've always thought about and had to solicit from other labels. Now we're being solicited with these ideas.

AS: I think we had to learn from our experiences and do things a little differently this time around. If we had gone into a similar label situation as the two we'd previously been in, we would have been fools. In talking to Nettwerk, their idea of how to handle a record like this was immediately very different. We don't get the sense that it's going to be only about sending the first single to radio. They have a small roster and they're willing to stick with records for a very long time, and look in a lot of places for the kinds of breaks you might need to make it a success.

NATN: It's weird. Apartment Life seemed primed for success.

AS: I think obviously we thought so too, and two major labels though so as well. I don't think any of us were necessarily crazy to think that. But the reality of making that happen is sometimes very
difficult, and especially at a time when the radio formats that might have played us a few years before had gotten heavier and heavier. It wasn't an easy fit. The thing we're really excited about now is that
Nettwerk has had success with stuff that's relatively similar to Ivy. We're not being shoehorned into a marketing plan that was designed for a rap-rock band. They are thinking about it based on what it
actually sounds like.

NATN: The new album seems to take the sound of Apartment Life to the
next level.

DD: When we were making Realistic, we had no idea what we were doing. It was our first time recording. On Apartment Life, we had more of a clear idea to use more instruments. But we thought we'd just record the songs we have. For Long Distance, we knew what sound we wanted to create in terms of atmosphere and mood. We wanted to do much more of a mellow record, more moody and dark. It's a little more mature, I guess. Also for me as a singer, I think I'm much more comfortable singing moodier songs than upbeat songs. It just seems more natural for me.

AS: Ivy started out in the recording studio. We made our first record before we'd ever played a show. It's always been Andy and myself trading instruments in the studio and bringing in other people when necessary. Right from the beginning, we had to find outside musicians in order to play live.

AC: Apartment Life was a real concerted effort to do certain things we hadn't felt experienced enough to do during Realistic. Looking back, we felt the making of Realistic was kind of confining. We were very much rooted in the indie rock world, and it had to predominantly be guitars, and the production sensibility couldn't be too sophisticated. With Apartment Life, we wanted to branch out and make the record we would have made with Realistic if we hadn't felt so confined. Before this record, when we looked at Apartment Life, there are highs and lows dynamically. There are moments where you can almost be lulled to sleep, but then an upbeat song would come in and
ruin the vibe, so to speak. We really wanted to make a record that was more conceptual, more consistent from beginning to end. Maybe even songs that segued into one another. Even if it was an uptempo song, it still would feel of the same mettle if the next song was a ballad. We wanted to create a mood for 45 minutes that didn't just feel disjointed. At that point, we knew what songs to pick from, because we immediately rejected songs that might be good pop songs but didn't fit that criteria.

AS: Looking back on the songs we've recorded to date, the songs the three of us felt held up the best were the ones that had a certain atmosphere to them, and a certain mood. We felt like that was the strong point of the band. It's not to say we don't want to write a simple pop song every once in a while -- "Lucy Doesn't Love You" is a little more reminiscent of older Ivy stuff.

NATN: Is the North American version different than the Japanese version?

AC: The version coming out on Nettwerk will have 13 songs. The one in Japan had 14. It's virtually the same. The 14th song in Japan was just kind of an instrumental. The song that was added after we finished Long Distance is the 13th song on the Nettwerk version. It's a cover of "Digging Your Scene" by the Blow Monkeys. That was our response to sitting back and getting a little paranoid about making a record that may have gone too far into the mood, without enough uplifting moments. We tried to temper that by throwing in one light, fun pop song. We couldn't find a place to put it, so we just tacked it on at the end.

NATN: Has it been since the last ill-fated tour since Ivy toured widespread?

AC: Well, the ill-fated tour where we got dropped, that was the first day of a seven-week tour. So we became scrupulous watching our pennies. We cut corners. We drove at 55 instead of 85, and we had enough money at the end of the tour to go out on another tour solely funded by that. This was between Atlantic and Sony. We went out with Komeda.

NATN: What is Ivy's setlist like these days?

DD: Actually, our set we've rehearsed has "Too Sensitive" from the EP, "The Best Thing" and "Get Out Of The City" from Apartment Life, and "Get Enough" from the first album.

NATN: How about "Don't Believe A Word?"

AC: That's one of the most requested songs!

DD: What album is that on? Is it on Apartment Life? [laughs]

AC: It's on Realistic.

AS: We did play "Don't Believe A Word" during the Apartment Life tour sometimes. We almost always play "Get Enough," which is one of the first songs we ever did. As a fan, I always hate to see a band who ignores all their old stuff. Even if there's only two people in the audience that will know it, you have to do some new stuff.

NATN: Do you think any of the songs from new album will be hard to translate live?

AS: I think they can all work, but some of them need to be reinterpreted a bit. There are some where we don't even bother to try replicating the studio trickery, and others that work as is. But the
good thing about a song that's well written is that it can work with different arrangements. We're really into changing things around live if need be.

NATN: Do you guys switch instruments?

AS: In the past we've usually stayed in our place, with me as the bass player and Andy as the guitar player. On these recent shows, I've actually been playing keyboards. We've been talking about doing more switching around.

NATN: When will your tour in support of this album begin?

DD: We don't know. Nothing is booked yet. I'm not crazy, unless it's a great band that we like, about going and warming up. We've done it so many times and it just doesn't pay off for us.

AC: We're getting pickier and more demanding [laughs]. To open for someone, it would have to be for bands that are probably unattainable anyway, like U2 or Radiohead. Other than that, we want to just go and headline.

DD: It's much better to play in front of a small audience that is clearly there for you, than playing for a lot of people who just want to see the other band. It's so depressing. We've done it so many
times, and that's it [laughs].

NATN: Both Adam and Andy have really branched out with production work in the past few years.

AC: That's a real passion for me, producing and engineering. I like wearing both hats. I intend to do it every second I have outside of Ivy, as does Adam. The fire didn't deter us at all. We ended up
finding another space and we signed a 10-year lease. It's still called Stratosphere. It has been an eight-month project. I've had to go Japan a lot the last year to produce, and I'm looking forward to
having a place where those artists can come to. I've worked with an artist named Chara. She's pretty huge.

DD: She's like the Bjork of Japan. She's really quirky.

AC: She is. I didn't realize how famous she was. I just assumed that since I hadn't heard of her, nobody had. I was asked to write a couple songs for her and to produce a bunch, including some she wrote. I had no idea who she was. There was no way to do any kind of investigative work, because she sings in Japanese and isn't released here. I just finished producing a singer called Chocolate, who is managed by the same people who manage Cornelius and Kahimi Karie. My
dream has always been to create a studio environment the way I think of Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade at Fort Apache [in Boston]. Our dream is for people to think of us as producers and associate that sound with our specific studio.

NATN: Will you be working with Tahiti 80 again?

AC: They just asked me to do their next record this fall, which was a real honor. I'm just trying to figure out how to juggle that and touring with Ivy. Their label status is not really clear. They're on
Minty Fresh and have a great relationship with them. I don't know enough about their contract and if Minty Fresh has the rights to the next record. There was some talk about Minty Fresh trying to work together with a major label to release it here. I think everyone felt Tahiti 80 has immense potential, but it requires a lot of foundational setup and legwork at the grassroots level, for a long time. I think at a certain point it becomes obvious that they may need help.

NATN: Dominique and Andy, what can you tell me about the project you two have been working on yourselves?

DD: Again, this has been going on forever. It's Andy and myself and two other friends of ours. One of the guys was writing music and one day asked if I wanted to sing on it. Andy was producing it and doing some of the writing. We just put out an EP on our own.

AC: It was taking so long, we were like, "oh my god, we only have five songs. Do we want to wait another year and do five more?" And we were like, "no, let's just put it out and see if people like it."
It's called Paco.

DD: We've been selling it through the Ivy Web site, and it's so funny, because somebody got a tape to John Dahl, who did "The Last Seduction" and "Red Rock West," and they're using one of the songs in his next movie.

NATN: Adam S., what's going on with Fountains Of Wayne? Has the band recorded anything since Utopia Parkway?

AS: We've done a few odds and ends. We did a song for the "Scary Movie" soundtrack, and a cover of "Better Things" for a Kinks tribute album. We've done a few demos and semi-album track-type stuff, but I imagine that at some point we'll block out a few weeks and do a new record. We tend to record pretty quickly so for us, it's really about waiting until we feel like we have the songs.

NATN: You produced the forthcoming Verve Pipe album. What can you tell us about it?

AS: Their second album was a rough experience for everyone involved, from what I hear. I think they got led down a path that they didn't necessarily want to get led down. I think this new record is
fantastic. I honestly do. It's really poppy and it's really sort of organic sounding, with a lot of cool grooves and immediate songs. I think people are going to be really surprised by it. They're really a
pop band at heart, and one of the reasons I enjoyed working with them is that we have really similar tastes. We finished recording it in February and it was mixed in March. Now they're just getting  ready to set it up.

July 14, 2001
No 'Distance' Too Long
By Jonathan Cohen
From Billboard

It's something you don't hear every day, but Ivy's Andy Chase insists that being dropped from the rosters of Atlantic and 550 Music/Epic Records was the best thing that ever happened to the New York-based pop/rock trio. Rising from that tumultuous chapter in the Ivy story is "Long Distance," released in Japan last November by EastWest and finally arriving in the rest of the world this week via Nettwerk.

"Long Distance" was intended to be Ivy's first album for 550 Music/Epic, which had reissued 1997's "Apartment Life," the group's final Atlantic release before being dropped by that label. But 550 Music/Epic severed ties with the band before "Long Distance" was finished. To add insult to injury, the New York studio that Chase ran with Ivy's Adam Schlesinger and ex-Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha burnt to the ground during the recording process. The group completed the sessions in Chase and Durand's apartment.

The homespun intimacy of this setting seeped into the sound of Long Distance, which wraps Ivy's melodic indie pop in inviting electronic textures far removed from the group's earlier, guitar-centric leanings. Durand's sensual vocals are beguiling as ever on such regret-tinged love songs as "One More Last Kiss," "Disappointed," and "Worry About You." Among the other highlights are the trip-hop-infused "Edge of the Ocean" and "Blame It on Yourself," the chorus of which sports some unexpected distorted guitar blasts. Look for the group on tour in North America early this fall.

June 14, 2001
The Slow Rise of Ivy
By Lauren Viera
From Hearsay

Amongst the jumble of Japanese characters spelling out song titles, credits and yen that clutter the removable end-sleeve of the Apartment Life import, there are two words that, presumably, are meant to tell a foreign-record-store clerk exactly where to file the album. This probably helps a great deal, considering the recording comes from an unusual American trio by way of a Parisian lead singer. "Sophisticated Pop." It couldn't be more fitting. Pop is all-encompassing enough, but Ivy aptly spells sophistication via sultry French-accented vocals, horn and string arrangements, synthesized undertones and the inevitable guitar/drum/bass structure that ties it all together.

They don't rush the tempos. They don't mess around with feedback. They're never really loud enough to be irritating, or too reserved to come off as mousy or feeble. They're like the cool kids in high school that didn't try to fit into any kind of clique because they were already secure enough with themselves, even at a young age, to know that cliques are overrated. And, as is always the case with those types, they're incredibly attractive. And they're nice. And no, there's no catch.

"My daughter's filthy."

Andy Chase states the obvious. He and Dominique Durand are seated on opposite ends of a New York park bench in Chelsea, a reporter and a tape recorder between them, but they don't look at each other. Both sets of eyes are fixed straight ahead in the direction of their daughter, Justine, who is having the time of her 22-month-old life, stomping her tiny red mary-janes repeatedly in a fresh mud puddle, squealing with delight as she does so, as if there were some kind of direct quota between dirt on clothes and happiness in life.

For Durand and Chase, two thirds of Ivy (the duo is augmented by bassist Adam Shlesinger), it's just another day in the park with the newest addition to their family. Justine is one of many life changes that have flushed out the last two of the band's eight years. While Long Distance, the follow up to Apartment Life, is new to American record stores this month, the material is a few years old, having been put on hold after a series of complications that Ivy went through in the midst of recording.

"Well, there was our kid, of course, who put a little bit of a break in our schedule," says Chase. "We started [recording Long Distance] in June of '99 and Dominique was about eight months pregnant, and after about three weeks of tracking, she was just too exhausted. So we had our kid, and then started again in August. But after a week in August, we were both way too tired at that point, so we took another break and we just said, 'OK, we're going to start again in the fall,' and the week we took the break, our studio basically caught on fire. The whole building went up in flames, and that was the end of our studio."

The way Chase relates it now, it's obvious he's gotten over the tragedy, but only because things worked themselves out in the months following. While Ivy initially feared that the Long Distance masters had burned in the fire, it so happened that they were left intact amongst the charred ruins of Stratosphere Sound, the former studio space co-owned with James Iha (former guitarist for Smashing Pumpkins). The band regrouped, made a temporary studio that autumn in Durand's and Chase's apartment to finish recording, but just as they were settling into their routine, drama hit again.

"That winter, we were dropped from Sony," Chase says. "They hadn't heard the record yet. Then there was another two months where we thought that they were going to have to come into our apartment and repossess the masters, and we didn't think they were going to give them to us. And at that point, we just threw up our hands and said, that's it! Babies, fires, record companies... that's it. But we got the record back. We actually got our whole back catalog back [from Sony], so it was a blessing in disguise. We finished the record ourselves, and here we are."

Of course, at that point, the record was done, but Ivy was without a label. Just when they were considering DIY alternatives for getting Long Distance out to their fans, an acquaintance in Japan gave them a ring, hooked them up with East-West (ironically a subsidiary of Atlantic, who had dropped Ivy after putting out Apartment Life), and the album made its debut in Japan in October of 2000. A tour with Tahiti 80 ensued, and just around the time Ivy was returning to New York, mid-sized Nettwerk America offered to put out the album, and began preparing it for national release.

"It's been a long journey," says Chase. And that's an understatement.

Complications aside, Long Distance - aptly titled considering the work that went into it - feels like summer. In fact, Ivy itself feels like summer: clean, breezy, cool, crisp, fresh. Along the same vein as Apartment Life, the breakthrough record that took the feel of the Realistic debut (Seed, 1995) and grew it up a bit, Ivy's signature sound is embodied in 13 tracks of mellow, sonorous melodies, only Durand's accent is a little less prominent this time around. Considering the songs were written by a collective boasting both a talented producer (Chase produced Tahiti 80's hugely successful debut) and a multi-tasker (Schlesinger does double time with longtime Ivy comrades Fountains of Wayne and is a partner with Iha at Scratchie Records), it's no wonder they sound so polished. Ivy's even got its own side project, called Paco, which Durand has described as darker and a little edgier than the light pop she stirs into Ivy. Paco will become more of a focus after the hype surrounding Ivy's new record dies down some, though one has to wonder - do these people ever have downtime? Maybe not, but at least their music has the ability to express it.

June 1, 2001
Ivy - Long Distance Review
From Baby Sue

Ivy - Long Distance
(CD, Nettwerk, Pop)

MAJOR ORGASM NOW IN PROCESS.

New York's Ivy have long been one of our top favorite pop bands of all time. Each and every album that the band has released has pushed our favorite buttons. Long Distance is as good as anything the band has recorded. If you thought that this band couldn't sound any smoother or get any better then THINK AGAIN. Dominque Durand, Adam Schlesinger, and Andy Chase have really outdone themselves with this lush and wonderful collection of tunes. The album starts off with the hypnotic and addicting "Undertow"...a tune so incredibly beautiful that it gave us chills on the very first listen. This is followed by "Disappointed," a strange and haunting composition with an unforgettable chorus. The band then keeps the quality UP for the remaining eleven tunes. Favorite song title: "Lucy Doesn't Love You" (ha ha ha ha ha). Ms. Durand's voice has always sounded wonderful...but for some reason this time around she sounds ever BETTER. (Using a different vocal microphone, perhaps?) For those who are unfamiliar with this band, Ivy tunes are (for the most part) slow, dreamy tunes with superb arrangements and a lead singer with a breathy French accent. While Mr. Schlesinger and Mr. Chase are probably more well known for some of their other endeavors (Fountains of Wayne, etc.), artistically this is the greatest thing that any of these three individuals have ever been involved with (to our knowledge anyway). What sets this band apart from the others--first and foremost--are their wonderful songs. In an era where songwriting generally takes a back seat to technology and/or worthless guest artists, these folks' material blows others AWAY. This is the sort of stuff that sends us straight up into HEAVEN...in a smoky haze of prescription sedation. Totally beautiful and virtually perfect, Long Distance will easily be one of the best CDs to be released in 2001. That's for CERTAIN. This is A MUST HAVE. (Rating: 5+++)

New York-based pop act Ivy has set a series of acoustic performances around the July 10 release of its upcoming Nettwerk album, "Long Distance." The group has confirmed shows in New York
(July 11) and Los Angeles (July 13-14), with additional dates expected in Boston and San Francisco. A full headlining tour of North America is being set up for early fall in support of the set, which was first issued last year in Japan by EastWest.

In related news, Ivy's Adam Schlesinger tells Billboard.com that his other group, Fountains Of Wayne, plans to "make a new record over the summer if we can squeeze it in, or at least start." The group, which released two albums for Atlantic, is currently shopping for a new label deal. FOW has
also been asked to contribute to a new VH1 animated series, where the group appears "from time to time to sing little song snippets that help move the story along," Schlesinger says.

Schlesinger has also completed production work on modern rock outfit the Verve Pipe's third studio album, "One For You ... Two For Me," due Sept. 11. Meanwhile, Ivy's Andy Chase will re-team with Tahiti 80 to produce the French rock group's second album later this year.

Here are Ivy's tour dates:
July 11: New York (Tonic)
July 13: Los Angeles (KCRW radio show)
July 14: Los Angeles (the Mint)

From The New Musical Express, May 15, 1999

 Received wisdom has it that pop music can be either clever or dumb or moving, that you can either 'say' something or 'move' people, that you can't have it both ways. Received wisdom also has it that Fountains of Wayne are yet another insufferably cynical, pseudo-indie American rock-folly, destined to go nowhere and mean nothing to anyone, ever (see also Ben Folds Five, Weezer, et al).

Fuck 'received wisdom.' And fuck you too if you can't jimmy your minds open just long enough to see what Fountains of Wayne are doing with their immaculately crunchy power-pop. Just as '97's eponymous debut was a perfect introduction to the band's sound, so their upcoming 'Utopia Parkway' LP is the apex, a suite of acidly-sharp songs mixing warmhearted affection with Randy Newman-esque portraits of 20th Century America. Kinda like 'Parklife,' if Damon had grown up on Big Star, Badfinger and ELO instead of The Kinks.

Live, 'The Valley Of Malls' is The Monkees' 'Pleasant Valley Sunday' suspended forever in aspic, all sharp observations poking through its lean, bubblegum-ribs, and new single 'Red Dragon Tattoo' foolishly mixes music and comedy, yet comes away with a deftly wry Cars-esque thrash and priceless couplets.

But there's more to Fountains of Wayne than just compacted witticisms. There's the infallible pop-touch, best exhibited tonight in 'Radiation Vibe's massive "Baby, baby, baby shine on" chorus (sending the refreshingly youthful pit stagedive crazy) and 'Hat and Feet' a deliciously airy jangling meringue, which sounds as if it might drift off in its own wibbly wobbly world. And then there are songs like the swoonsome 'Sick Day' and the bubbling 'Troubled Times,' heart-rending, expert melancholic melodicism perfectly underscoring the lean, schmaltz-free lyricism.

They leave us with their cover of Britney Spears' 'Baby One More Time.' It's no tired 'schmindie' joke, rather an inspired, if irreverent, take on a 'genuine pop hit. It's the Fountains all over -- tongue in cheek, hearts in the right place.

From The Washington City Paper, April 30, 1999

 Never, ever put mustard on a corn dog, You hear me? Just don't do it. In fact, this vastly underappreciated prince of the junk-food kingdom should never be encumbered by a condiment of any kind - let alone bothered by knives or forks or napkins. Slather some glop on one of these boardwalk bad boys and you risk hindering the most religious experience of skee-ball cuisine: the first bite, those one, two, three inches of grease-golden batter, unassuming lukewarm frankfurter, and hard wooden spike that greets teeth with an unwelcome "clud." Sure, the remainder of your bliss-blanketed wiener will no doubt be wonderful, but nothing is as life-affirming as that first de-virginizing chomp. Once it's over - and you're left grinning dumbly, your red, puffed lips encircled by a high-cal sheen - all you can do is stare off into a vacation's sea of flashing lights, lame T-shirt slogans, and underage smokers, and dream about the next one. Life, my friends, doesn't get much better than that.

UTOPIA PARKWAY, the sophomore album from the merry songwriting duo of supercool nerds Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood - aka Fountains of Wayne - is a paper-platterful of 15 musical corn dogs, breezy bursts of song that offer little nutritional value but put the double "e" in tastee nonetheless. What the New York-based band (with the New Jersey state of mind) used as pop frosting for its 1996 self-titled debut album - which included instant mood-improver "Radiation Vibe" - it uses here to make the whole cake. UTOPIA PARKWAY - named after a boring thoroughfare running through the heart of Queens - is not so much a collection of songs as a gaggle of beyond-happy hooks. (Only one song runs longer than four minutes, and a trio of tunes pulls in well under three). It's an album to be played during the long days between mid-May and early September, when you're picking out your own private patch of sand in Ocean City or Virginia Beach or, for that matter, the sun-starved recesses of your brain. It's smart, bubble gum pop for grown-ups - Weezer without the irony - and damned if it doesn't work.

For the retro-grooved title song of Tom Hanks' directorial debut, THAT THING YOU DO, Schlesinger proved he could cleverly imitate the gee-whiz rock of The Archies but still dust the effort with enough contemporary twists to keep matters hip. On UTOPIA PARKWAY, Schlesinger revisits his schoolboy crush on Jughead & Co., but, with the influence of Collingwood, winds up penning a few love letters to Ric Ocasek and Jeff Lynne as well. "Red Dragon Tatoo," about a wannabe punk trying to impress a girl by getting some ink done, shows off a serpentine keyboard line straight out of The Cars' "Shake it Up"-era songbook. "Denise," with her big hair and boring job as a travel agent, inspires equal part high-arcing harmonies, cheese-pop keyboards, and hand claps as good as any ELO ever wrought.

The impossible beauty of FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE'S "Radiation Vibe" is somehow matched here by three songs. "Prom Theme," propelled by a slow wave of strings - a first for the band - features an Alan Parsons blend of orchestration for teen dreamers and wordplay for old-timers, those of us still harboring bitter visions of that infamous night. ("We'll never be the same/We'll forget each other's names/We'll grow old and lose our hair/It's downhill from there"). "Troubled Times" is a legitimate weeper, the acoustic-driven tale of star-cross'd lovers mired in the muck of heartache. And the sweetest bite of corn dog on the album, "Go, Hippie," voiced by a pragmatist unable to embrace the beliefs of modern-day flower children, unveils a sorrowful, forgiving chorus amidst psychedelic guitar wah-wahing. Music, my friends, doesn't get much more uplifting than this.

There are a few instances on UTOPIA PARKWAY where Schlesinger and Collingwood aim for some more juicy junk food but come up with just junk: "Hat and Feet" is a grating gnat of a song absent of a hook but chock full of bad rhymes; and "It Must Be Summer" may taste pretty swell at first, but before long - say, 30 seconds or so - the cut reveals itself to be nothing more than throwaway noise from an early-'80s Andrew McCarthy flick.

Still, if Britney Spears and The Back Street Boys are providing the actual tunes that rustle beach umbrellas in Fenwick Island and Rehoboth these days, then Fountains of Wayne provide the spiritual soundtrack, the natural music whistling through your head as you strut down the boardwalk and think about where you are, where you've been, and how you desperately crave a corn dog. Not to mention a powder-drowned funnel cake, which is a different story altogether.

From New Musical Express Online, April 1999

Somehow you get the feeling that Ivy will never be 'big in the clubs'. Suited more to trendy lifts, the New York-based three-piece are the suave, slightly hollow, but very pretty side of sugary pop that is easy on the ears but pointless in all other ways.

This is partly due to the icily immaculate voice of French singer Dominique Durand. Perfect throughout, it's so measured that any incidental feeling is chopped neatly into bite-sized chunks for us to digest at leisure. The sterile precision of it all is part Laetitia Stereolab, part Suzanne Vega, but far cheerier than either of them.

This is because 'Apartment Life' is an album by numbers. It has brass sections, a token celebrity in Smashing Pumpkins' James Iha, the odd glaring summer hit ('I Get The Message') and, er, Adam Schlesinger of Fountains Of Wayne in the band. Its crowning glory, though, is the alarmingly poppy single 'This Is The Day', better known for its part in There's Something About Mary.

All you could ever need from a somewhat functional, entirely pleasant pop band when you're stuck in a lift, in other words.
5/10

From The New York Times, February 14, 1999
Katherine Michel, Adam Schlesinger: Vows
By Lois Smith Brady

Ms. Michel, 27, is a graphic designer at Grenfell Press, a publisher of art books in New York. She moved to Manhattan after graduating from Yale and lived in a tiny Greenwich Village apartment above Le Zoo, a restaurant on West 11th Street. "Every night, I fell asleep to the kitchen radio," she said.

One evening in September 1996, she walked around the corner to WXOU Radio, a bar on Hudson Street, and ordered red wine to sip with her People magazine. Soon, a group of musicians sitting nearby invited her to join them. One was Adam Lyons Schlesinger, a composer and bass guitarist, who is a member of two New York pop bands, Fountains of Wayne and Ivy.

Mr. Schlesinger wrote the theme for the 1996 film "That Thing You Do!" He is known for writing catchy, clever, Beatles-like songs about things like prom nights and unrequited crushes. "His lyrics are incredibly funny and very informed by a smartass goofiness, like Steve Martin in 'The Jerk,' " said Jeremy Freeman, a fan and childhood friend.

Mr. Schlesinger, 30, grew up in Montclair, N.J., graduated from Williams College and hung out regularly at WXOU. He lived a few blocks away in a ramshackle fifth-floor walkup. When friends came by, he dropped the keys out the window. He did the same with Federal Express packages.

"I thought he was a cute, smart, funny guy from New Jersey and kind of a rock star," Ms. Michel said. About a month later, she was working on charcoal drawings one night when she decided to go back to WXOU and look for Mr. Schlesinger. "He was there," she remembered. "So, I said, 'Can I join you?'"

Mr. Schlesinger recalled that she had charcoal all over her hands and arms. "It was that just-out-of-the-art-studio look," he said. "I had this idea of her taking a break from this creative frenzy."

They talked for hours, surrounded by baseball photographs and neon beer signs. When they parted, he promised to call. But when he didn't, Ms. Michel left this message on his machine: "I'm calling to find out when you're going to call me." Impressed, he phoned her right back.

Before long, Ms. Michel was accompanying Fountains of Wayne on a national tour with the band Smashing Pumpkins. She traveled to Los Angeles with Mr. Schlesinger when his song "That Thing You Do!" was nominated for an Academy Award. She spent most of the evening talking to Faye Dunaway. "Lo and behold, I became a rock star groupie," Ms. Michel said. "You go into this bar, and then suddenly, your whole life is changed."

They were married on Jan. 30 at Le Zoo. The bride arrived in a greenish-white leather Prada suit with a miniskirt and a smile as big as Julia Roberts's. In lieu of an aisle, she walked down the sidewalk with her father, Clifford L. Michel, a partner in the New York law firm Cahill, Gordon & Reindel. "As she got closer to the restaurant, she hiked up her skirt so everyone could see her green lingerie," Ms. Kellison said.

For the reception nearby at M Studio, a loft on Bank Street, the bride changed into a purple Valentino gown with feathered neck and wrists. One guest, Dorothy Kalins, the former editor of Metropolitan Home magazine, said, "They're so the opposite of an uptight couple. On the tables are bunches of tulips, not tight little scary bouquets. The invitation said, 'A very fancy party.' It did not say black tie. It wasn't about behavior modification. It was about celebration."

From New Musical Express, May 10, 1997
A Question of Spurt

From between the palm leaves, the interlopers ease their way into the wedding party. Slowly they sidle through the bow-tied and gowned guests, past the trickling brook teeming with exotic goldfish, towards the bower where the bride and groom are posing for photographs in an alcove of Caribbean-like greenery.

"Excuse me." The tall blond scruffbag sidles nervously up to a blushing bridesmaid. "Can we have our picture taken with you?" he asks.

A gorilla-sized bouncer checks the visitors' book to find out exactly who these uninvited ruffians are. "Larry Hagman," he reads, "Dallas, TX..."

"Er..." the bridesmaid giggles, "who's it for?"

"Oh, just the enemy."

Outside, Toronto shivers under a flurry of mid-April snow. But just inside the Canadian National Conservatory, just 300 yards from their ice-caked hotel, Fountains Of Wayne have stumbled on a tropical rainforest full of tranquillity, love, and outlandish beauty. Typical of a band who have taken up permanent residence on The Bright Side. A band whose every chord is struck in defiance of America's inherent misery-rock. A band who take the bump, grump, and grind of everyday life and make it sound like The Beach Boys on a 24-hour sponsored grin. A band who have written a song called "How We Gonna Kill The Dog?" and yet are, um, nice to cats...

"I'm working on this theme park for cats at the moment," giggles bassist and co-songsmith Adam Schlesinger over a post-nuptial mineral water back at the hotel. "It's gonna be called Tuna Ridge. It's like a vacation getaway for cats. It's a really overlooked section of the pet market. It's gonna have these heart-shaped boxes with sweaters in them."

"There'll be some rides that are a bit harsher," adds drummer and one-time Posie, Brian Young, "so only cats over 1 ft. 2 in. will be allowed on."

Singer and golden-locked heart-throb-in-waiting, Chris Collingwood chuckles into his glass and sings the park's theme song and you realise in an instant of sheer terror that Fountains Of Wayne have seriously discussed this project. At some length. Jesus, the radiation vibe has gone to their heads.

Canada, right. That comedy festival. The bloke from Cheers in a Mountie costume. Being really bored forever. That's it. For Fountains of Wayne, however, the Land Slightly To The North Of The Free conjures an infinitely more horrific image.

"CELINE DION!" yells Brian. "The weird thing about Celine Dion is that in the video she wears this white outfit and she's got this HUGE PACKAGE!!"

The walls themselves crinkle their noses.

"EEEUUURRGGHH!!" cries everyone simultaneously. "That's disgusting!"

Too right. Let's have some more of the same.

Brian: "Word has traveled fast about the part in our live show where Chris sets himself on fire..."

Chris: "It started as just lighting farts, then my shirt caught on fire..."

Ultra-cool guitarist Jody Porter: "Hey, so far we've talked about Celine Dion's crotch and lighting farts. I like the image we're projecting."

Us too. But then, Fountains of Wayne needn't worry their geeky little heads about image projection. It's in the bag. Ever since their debut single, "Radiation Vibe" brought summer forward by three months with a single cry of "Baby baby baby!" last month they've been penned in as the brightest, breeziest, and brilliantest American band to shove indoor fireworks up Bush's well-studied arseholes this year.

They are Weezer without the willful anti-cool stance. Velvet Crush without the total lack of success. Teenage Fanclub spray-painting "I Must Not Be So Darned Miserable" on the back of Brian Wilson's old skool anorak. Purveyors of the finest open-roof highway-cruisin' summer pop mayhem for aeons. Which means, by law, that they must be insecure Samaritans regulars spouting messages of doom underneath it all, right?

"If that's there then that's not necessarily intentional," Serious One Adam explains. "It's funny that if you write a song from any perspective other than the heroic messiah figure or the anti-messiah, it's seen as some kind of loser rock. There's a broader range of emotion that you can put into a song than that. If you write some lyrics that are at all personal or with some real life in it, people say you're writing from the loser perspective. Collegiate Art Pop."

Indeed, it'd be easy to scan the song titles on the Waynes' (well, they were asking for it, weren't they?) eponymous debut album -- "Leave the Biker," "Please Don't Rock Me Tonight," "You Curse At Girls," -- and reach straight for the anti-They Might Be Giants flamethrower. Yet these are all classic surf-pop masterpieces with no diplomas in Advanced Clever Dickery hidden behind their sway-along choruses. Even translating their marvelous Goofy-fronts-Nirvana new single, "Sink To The Bottom," as a statement of fatalism is denounced as "looking too deep, maan." But c'mon, lads! "I wanna sink to the bottom with you...I'm going nowhere/Getting there soon."...

"It's wrong to take those songs too literally," Adam says. "'Sink to the Bottom' was written in ten minutes, so there isn't really a point behind it. We used to sit around and come up with song titles and see if we could write the song around it. Some of 'em were too far on the side of novelty to actually present to anybody. Songs like 'How We Gonna Kill the Dog?'"

Chris: "The Things We Do For Money'..."

Adam: "'Shut Up Sheep'..."

Chris: "'Cute Little Freshman Girl', remember that?"

"We've always seen the kind of music we do as made for radio," Adam explains. "Big singalong chorus, some guy going 'Baby baby baby'. That's supposed to be blasting over the airwaves. A lot of these so-called 'pop' groups have forgotten that part of it and they intentionally make their songs too difficult or clever for that to ever happen."

If this sounds as though FOW are mindlessly sucking on the encrusted cock of Satan in return for Pick Of The Week slots beyond their wildest dreams, consider that they've spent the last ten years struggling to get anywhere near that diabolic phallus. After Chris and Adam met at college they trawled their way through a decade of no-hoper bands while Chris scraped a living in a lawnmower repair shop, from which he still has the scars from "fixing them while they were still on."

It wasn't until the pair roped in Jody and "sailing instructor and exotic bird smuggler" Brian two years ago, got hideously pissed and recorded an album that was never meant to see the light of day due to a fuckup of the contractual variety, that the Fountains finally started to trickle success.

Adam scored a one-off hit with a co-written ditty entitled "That Thing You Do!" (from the film of the same name, starring Oscar-winning slosh merchant Tom Hanks) and the band found themselves thrust onto arena support slots with The Lemonheads and Smashing Pumpkins. And as ones more likely to frug heartily to Pulp than Phish, they were plunged headfirst into the Realm Of The Misunderstood.

"On the Pumpkins tour," Adam recalls, "Chris would introduce 'Please Don't Rock Me Tonight' and the kids would hear the word 'rock' and start screaming!"

Yet another example of the nationwide allergy to irony that plagues the US, then?

"A certain section of the American population get irony," says Chris, "but the mass record buying public doesn't. It's not something that's ingrained in the culture like in the UK."

"A song like 'Common People' by Pulp would never work in America because it's too subtle," Adam continues. "The point it's making would be lost on people here. You need to have that fist-in-the-air chorus thing."

Which is why Fountains Of Wayne are such an exciting thorn in the arse of American rock -- the double agents betraying their gurning grunge paymeisters by whacking out stunning pop tunes when they're not looking.

"We're taking the kind of stuff we've always written and sneaking it on people," Chris grins, "so people don't even notice what's happened until they're already singing along."

The US pop revolution is upon us and its war cry is "Baby baby baby."

In the tiny Horseshoe bar deep in the heart of Celine Dion country, several hundred Northern Exposure extras fold their arms and jig gently along to "Radiation Vibe," unaware that they are being subliminally perverted by the evil denizens of shimmering '60s pop. Ironic ELO and Zombies covers melt into the haze as the crowd simply sway along and wonder when the fart-lighting ceremony will begin.

But methane is left mercifully unignited tonight. See, they may talk a whole load of quote-friendly --ahem -- guff, but in reality, FOW are clean-living, hard-playing men who only occasionally indulge in the odd pharmaceutical cocktail.

"I like to mix drugs," Chris smirks. "Yesterday I took some Afrin, Sudafed, antibiotics, and non-alcoholic beer and then later on..." he leans over and whispers conspiratorially, "...some Melatonin."

"I think we've had a winning season and given 106 percent," Brian mutters in end-of-interview tones. "I've looked on the scoreboard at all the arenas and we've beaten the audience by 16 points every night."

"Plus I had a shirt on that said '47," Chris adds, "and Billy Corgan said 'Zero.' So that's 47 more, isn't it?"

You see, in the world of the Waynes, the losers always triumph in the end.

From Rolling Stone, November 28, 1996
A Fountains of Wayne Bubble with Power Pop 
By Ira Robbins

All this may sound like the work of a stressed-out Filofax man, but Schlesinger -- who produced and played drums, bass, guitar, and keyboards on Fountains of Wayne -- is a casual overachiever who radiates exactly the opposite vibe. That goes double for Fountains of Wayne singer and guitarist Chris Collingwood, whose laconic wryness makes him a perfect foil for the more upbeat and forthright Schlesinger.

The two usually write separately, but both have a knack for memorable pop melodies that resonate with offbeat details and characters. Although Schlesinger is an unabashed Beatles and British Invasion fan, he says, "Our lyrics don't have anything to do with the kind you'd find back then. If anything, we're taking our own stupid lyrics and grafting them onto 60s pop conventions."

Collingwood, who cites Prefab Sprout and Aztec Camera among his favorites, thinks what makes this band so refreshing is its approach. "For us, it starts out as a writing thing, not a production thing," he says. "Most bands that make records with heavy guitars cite Sonic Youth as an influence. I have no knowledge of that stuff."

Schlesinger and Collingwood met at Williams College, in Massachusetts, 10 years ago, and have been friends and musical associates ever since. In 1991, Schlesinger relocated to Manhattan and got busy with Ivy; Collingwood stayed put in Boston for three more years, working in a bank and playing country music before moving to New York as well.

Last December, Schlesinger recalls, Collingwood phoned to rave about three songs he had just written. Schlesinger shared Collingwood's opinion of them, and Fountains of Wayne were born. "We decided to get together and crank out a bunch more, and record them before we had time to think about it too much," Schlesinger says.

Having recently hired ex-Belltower guitarist Jody Porter and drummer Brian Young of the Posies so that the band could perform live, Schlesinger and Collingwood face a bright, if busy, future. The only rubble in the road for the band (whose name comes from a store in New Jersey) is its album cover, which pictures a boy wearing superhero garb and clutching a rabbit. The photographer had previously licensed the same image to London's Flamingoes, whose record, Schlesinger points out, sits near the Fountains' in the bins. "We may turn this artwork into the limited-edition collector's run and replace it," he says. You have been warned.

College Music Journal, Summer, 1996
Album Review of Fountains of Wayne
By Randee Dawn

File Under: Slacker pop
RIYL: Cracker, Gigolo Aunts, Matthew Sweet

New Musical Express, March 1997
Let Us Spray 
By Sylvia Patterson

Phew. Adam Schlesinger, one half of Fountains of Wayne's superlative power-pop songwriting partnership with Chris Collingwood, crackles down a transatlantic blower and declares he is not a bonkers heroin-skewed Dylan off the Magic Roundabout. He does, however, have his doubts about Chris.

"He and Evan have a lot of musical things in common," he confesses -- Evan's a fan, thus they supported The Lemonheads on a recent American tour -- "They'd sit around the bus and play country songss together."

Erk. One can picture that scenario.

"Yeah," he snorts, "like a bad TV high-school movie."

New York's Fountains of Wayne are not your average American college-rock band. Minstrels of wry, melodic loveliness, they're The Lemonheads marooned in Brian Wilson's sandbox -- with a hint of what Kurt Cobain might have sounded like if he'd been a bit, y'know, cheerier.

"We love pop tradition," says Adam, and it's been away for a while so people now think it's innovative. Maybe that's just America. Theres definitely some of that in what we do, and cheesy '70s radio, but we're certainly not trying to hide it."

Good lad. Adam and Chris, both 29, have been making music together since they met at Williams College in Massachusetts ten years ago, but decided less than 18 months ago to do something serious with a few of Chris' pop-perfect paeans to life and all its beautiful disappointments (giving gainful live work to Jody Porter, ex-Belltower, on bass and Posies' drummer Brian Young).

Are they proud to be saps?

"Well," chortles Adam, "we do sing from the point of view of the guy who can't get the girl."

Besotted with "stupid lyrics," '60s radiance, and harmonic buoyancy, their current single "Radiation Vibe" is already a US cross-state legend. It's brilliant.

And Adam is mad: he's also in revered college luminaries Ivy, co-founded the Skratchie [sic] label with D'Arcy Smashing Pumpkin and wrote "That Thing You Do" by pretend band The Wonders from Tom Hanks' current cinematic cheese sarnie. Definitely not a comatose heroin addict then, which you'd expect from an outfit in direct opposition to the American "heroin music" of recent times.

"We're more...Jameson's whiskey," states Adam, thankfully. "Chris is always making fun of Soundgarden [Hey, but they don't have anything to do with heroin -- Libel Editor], that they hide behind a wall of inner turmoil, whereas in actual fact they're just not very good."

And you wouldn't find Chris Cornell naming his band after a garden centre, would you?

"It's more a store," clarifies Adam, "it sells what you call statuery -- fish that spout water, lawn fountains, gnomes. We liked it because out of context it doesn't mean anything at all. Some people think it's perverse, hehehehe!"

Romantic perverts on Irish whiskey: it's about time.

Siskel & Ebert, March 1997
Transcript from "If We Picked The Oscars"

Gene Siskel: I picked "That Thing You Do" because it had to stand up to a very specific challenge. It had to sound like a second-rate Beatles tune -- these are not the Beatles -- that still could have been a hit.

(clip from the film is shown)

Siskel: Now, you hear that song a real lot in this picture, and know I was never bored by it. The rest of the nominees: it's a very weak list this year. Three of the love songs seemed interchangeable. You could have switched them around, told us they were in other movies, played the soundtracks over them, and it would have made absolutely no difference. And as for "You Must Love Me" in Evita, it was the only new song in this film, that's how it could be nominated for this "original" song category, but I don't think it's even close to being the best song in Andrew Lloyd Webber's score.

Roger Ebert: I would agree with you that "That Thing You Do" does the job that it's supposed to do and does it very well.

(second envelope opens)

Siskel: Oh, boy, two great minds. "That Thing You Do."

Ebert: For me it was a choice between "That Thing You Do" and "You Must Love Me." I mean, those are the only two songs --

Siskel: Oh, the rest were junk.

Ebert: The others were -- they were both in their way real songs, the other three sounded like they were written to be performed by a Vegas lounge act. I finally decided "That Thing You Do" was the song I'd pick because I was I was intrigued by the three-fold challenge by songwriter Adam Schlesinger. One, it had to be a period song from the early 60s, two, you had to plausibly believe it could be a number one hit, and three, he had to create a song you could listen to over and over again for the whole movie and not get sick of it. That's a pretty tough assignment and he met all three challenges.

(clip from the film is shown)

Ebert: "That Thing You Do" performed by the group in the movie called The Wonders, and you know, listening to it again, if they had stuck together and been a real band, they probably would have developed. I would like to hear a whole album of Wonders hits.

Siskel: It's a very good song. And actually, Adam Schlesinger really deserves this trophy because he has created -- if you think about it -- that song is as important a character as any person in the movie.

Ebert: You can't have the movie without that song.

Gene Siskel: The movie breaks down if the song isn't any good.

end of transcript

From Chicago Tribune, June, 1998
Pop opposites meet in an evening of melancholy, irony.

Over the course of just two albums Ivy has nearly perfected its take on sophisticated, melancholy pop music. The challenge the New York trio now faces is how to translate the delicate detials of its recorded output to the live setting. Ivy's most recent release, "Apartment Life," is layered with shimmering cymbals and punctuated with tastefully arranged horns, just the kinds of things that usually get sacrificed come tour time.

Thankfully, Ivy doubled its lineup Thursday night at the Metro to deliver a fine set that mostly drew from its second album. Multi- instrumentalist Adam Schlesinger, perhaps best known for his work in the power- pop outfit Fountains of Wayne and his Oscar-nominated theme to the film "That Thing You Do!," was free to concentrate on his outstanding bass playing, while guitarist Andy Chase left all soloing duties to either a second guitarist or a trumpet/ keyboard player.

The additional players helped buoy such great songs as "I'vy Got A Feeling," "The Best Thing" and "No Guarantee." But despite the welcome addition of extra musicians, it was singer Dominique Durand whose French lilt gave the band its character, her pouty delivery lending the songs just the right level of ennui. Durand's distinctive voice and striking looks make her the de facto focus of the band, and her somber lyrics help differentiate Ivy from other pop purveyors on the music scene. Durand introduced the downbeat "Back In Our Town" as one of her favorites, which called attention to the dark heart at the center of Ivy's sometimes sunny melodies.

Despite Ivy's pleasant demeanor and capable delivery, they had the misfortune of following Komeda, a Swedish band with a keen grasp of irony and a knack for kooky pop confections. Komeda's energetic set drew largely from its latest release, the manic "What Makes It Go?," which owes a heavy debt to bands as disparate as Devo, Stereolab, and, needles to say, Abba. Singer Lena Karlson exhibited a knowing self-awareness, dutifully playing the star while at the same time reveling the band's endless supply of pop-culture kitsch. The other members of the band were equally eye-catching, whether in the form of orange-haired bassist Marcus Holmberg's fire red suit or Matias Norlander's Peter Frampton-esque vocal turns. But behind the goofiness lay a smart sense of songwriting that manifested itself in their quirky yet catchy songs.

Chicago's Aluminum Group opened with a short set of sly songs from their upcoming album "Plano." Enlisting a stand-up bassist, drummer, keyboard player and guitarist to help fill out the group's lush, loungey sound, brothers Frank and John Navin previewed a good deal of their new album, including "Angel on a Trampoline," "9 Months Later," "Steam" and the deceptively jaunty "Chocolates."