100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #84 Fountains of Wayne – Hackensack

Released: 2003

Most people’s recall for Fountains of Wayne will be through Stacy’s Mom, a big dumb hit with a bigger, dumber video that was designed as a radio-friendly tribute to The Cars and Cheap Trick. And trick it did; having been dropped after the poor commercial showing of their second album Utopia Parkway, songwriters Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood knew that in order to placate their new bosses something hooky was required, and their salacious update of Mrs. Robinson duly landed them yards of MTV coverage.

The travesty though was that the album which it was promoting in such a Horse-of-Troy manner was the group’s masterpiece. Welcome Interstate Managers was released in early 2003, but it’s feel was of that of a less complicated, pre 9/11 America, with Schlesinger and Collingwood’s observational songwriting treating it’s subjects with warmth and humour. Here were characters which were entirely relateable, from the young man on the verge of life changing stardom on All Kinds of Time, Bright Future In Sales’ hopelessly miscast slacker or the toking hippy dropping out in Peace And Love.

Musically the journey wound through classic 20th century guitar pop and new wave with occasional diversions, of which Hackensack represented the finest. On it Schlesinger cast a young man who’d ended up somehow missing the front door to life whilst a classmate had made it big in Hollywood; his unrequited love and gentle bitterness was pitch perfect to a backdrop that was gorgeous in it’s melancholy.

In the years that followed the band ended up more or less inactive after the release of 2011’s Sky Full of Holes, and tragically Schlesinger died after contracting a then vaccine-less COVID in April 2020. Still, we’ll always have Stacy’s Mom – or maybe not. After his death Collingwood revealed he was uncomfortable with it being his friend’s legacy, telling Rolling Stone “He was too good a writer to have that be his calling card, it’s sad to me that people reading his obituary will all know that song..he deserves to be remembered for more than a punch line.”

We all deserve to be remembered for something. Let Hackensack be small piece of that memorial.