Gossip is the new pornography

Last week I interviewed Adam Schlesinger from Fountains of Wayne. Friends know that FOW is one of my very favorite bands but I was originally not sold on this song (“All Kinds of Time”) the first half dozen times I heard it or so but when I began to realize how much the melody impacts the song, I started to appreciate it more. Having realized that, I started to enjoy it more. It was especially gratifying to hear Schlesinger tell me:

For me, the most satisfying part of writing a song is if you have an off-beat idea and you struggle with it for a while and ultimately it comes together. There are some songs for me like “All Kinds of Time”, from Welcome Interstate Managers, that we don’t play it live much but I’m really proud of it because I think it’s a really strange idea for a song and somehow it ends up being kind of moving in the end. You never know when that’s going to happen. It’s a terrible idea on paper – it’s about a football player and there’s no particular reason why this song should have come out. It didn’t have any emotional resonance but when all the music came together, it gave the song much more weight than I expected.

That’s another thing with songwriting. I often start off with a lyrical idea first then take musical ideas with it; but it really is interesting how words and music interact. A song may look a certain way on paper but when you hear it on top of a certain melody, it has a whole new meaning than what you might expect. I think that is what happened with that song.