Feature Articles
 You might not have heard his name yet, but Adam Schlesinger is a strong candidate for ASCAP's renaissance man of 1997: he's in two happening bands (Fountains Of Wayne and Ivy), he's a very busy television and jingle composer, he's a principal (along with the Smashing Pumpkins' James Iha and D'arcy) of the independent Scratchie Records, and he was recently nominated for a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar for composing the theme song to Tom Hanks' recent film, That Thing You Do.
To sample some of Adam's rock work you need only refer to Fountains Of Wayne's self-titled debut outing of pristine power-pop, or, better yet, check them out live, where the songs take on an added rock flavor courtesy of Posies drummer Brian Young and ex-Belltower guitarist Jody Porter. (Adam and Fountains cohort Chris Collingwood played most of the instruments on the album—Adam even played drums—but live you'll find him in a solid bass/backing vocals role.) Likewise, his other band, Ivy, will be releasing its second full-length album later this year.
Yet the main focus here is on the way that Adam's managed to branch out into many different areas of songwriting. As if it weren't already obvious, he's an ace at maximizing creative effort, and he's got some great advice for songwriters who wouldn't mind doing at least half of the work that he's doing.
Somehow, three days before Fountains Of Wayne took off on a month-long American tour opening for the Pumpkins, Adam found time to talk to us.
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Do you think that your work in television and commercial music has affected the way that you write songs in general?
In a way, yeah. I think you develop a sense of having to get something done, and I find that to be really constructive. I think one of the pitfalls of doing your own music is that sometimes you can never be satisfied with it: you're afraid to say that it's done, and you keep reworking it or re-recording it or re-writing it. I find it's very useful to treat it as a kind of an assignment that has to be finished by a certain time, even if that deadline is self-imposed. It makes you less precious about it.
How did a fairly normal rock guy like you get involved with television and commercial music?
A friend of mine was producing a show called House of Buggin', and he asked me to do the music. I did that with a partner named Steven Gold, 'cos I didn't really want to do it all myself. He's a really talented composer and he does a lot of TV and ad music, and he's more familiar with the way those things have to be delivered, in terms of the format and the technical side. So we worked together on that show and we got a bunch of other jobs through that: we did an HBO comedy hour-type special, some stuff for The Dana Carvey Show, and some stuff for Saturday Night Live. And we did a People magazine TV special, and some other various odds and ends.
How about jingles?
I haven't done a whole lot of jingles, but Steven and I did a few spots for a company called Crushing —some promos for TNT, a Gillette commercial, some radio ads for the Maryland State Lottery. I demo'ed a lot of things for them that they didn't use, which is pretty common for that business.
Can you pitch the rejected music to somebody else?
Yeah, a lot of the time you can. There was one spot that I was really depressed that I didn't get, this car company bit that I just thought was great, and they ended up going with this cheesey campaign, kinda like [sings horrible power-metal music]. Yugh. I had done this kinda Seal-ish music, very big and symphonic, but it didn't fly.
Did all of that work come from House Of Buggin'?
Not directly, but I met people through doing that. I got a little work out of Crushing because I just cold-called them and said, 'I'm a young writer looking to do some demos,' and it just happened to be at a time when they were interested in hearing work from new writers. I haven't worked with them in awhile, but they've started an in-house division that's been very successful doing more alternative-sounding stuff for commercials. If I cold-called them now I don't know if I'd be so lucky.
Do you need an agent for TV and commercial work?
Not really. For the most part everything I've gotten involved with has come through references or from things I've done before. There was a point where Steven and I were talking with some agents about repping us for TV, and we got this sense that whether you have an agent or not, most of the work comes from references. Until you get to the level of being a big film composer or Mike Post or someone like that, an agent won't really do that much for you, and a lot of the agents we met basically said as much. When we told them the kind of work we were getting for ourselves, they said, 'You guys would do better just doing it the way you're doing it for awhile.' It's one of those catch-22s: you can get a great agent once you've gotten three years of work offered to you!
How did That Thing You Do happen?
I have a publishing deal with PolyGram, and Danny Benair is the Film and TV person on the West Coast, so he heard about it first, and Holly Greene was very familiar with a lot of the kinds of songs I had written that had a '60s feel to them, so I guess they just thought of me as somebody who should give it a shot. I wrote the song as an assignment. The film company had the title and some specific guidelines of what they wanted: they wanted it to be upbeat, and they wanted it to be kind of Beatlesque, and they wanted it to sound like a one-hit wonder from 1964.
Were there any other artists that inspired the song?
They mentioned the Knickerbockers and the Beau Brummels and a few things like that. I went back and listened to those and a lot of old Beatles records, but I already knew them pretty well.
Did you talk to Tom Hanks about it? Not until after it was done; I had talked to the music supervisor briefly to get some instruction, but that's all. It was pretty amazing. I was surprised that Tom actually got to hear it. I figured I'd send it in and it'd get thrown into some refrigerator box full of tapes and never get listened to.
How much of your version actually ended up in the film?
They originally hired some session musicians to play and sing the track, but then they hired Mike Viola, who had sung on the demo, to redo the vocal. And there were certain things about the original demo that they liked, so they asked us to send out the demo master tapes, and I think they used some of the vocal tracks. But the arrangement is essentially identical to what we did on the demo.
I can't believe it, but that song was nominated for a Golden Globe Award! It's great, but I also found it amusing, because the people I'm up against are like Barbra Streisand and Marvin Hamlisch and Andrew Lloyd Webber. I sincerely doubt that I'm going to win [he didn't; Evita's "You Must Love Me" took the prize —ed.], but my grandparents saw that and just flipped. I think that was the first thing that meant anything to them in terms of placing it all in a larger context.
Is your television music usually re-recorded by outside musicians, or do you do them yourself?
With the TV stuff, we usually hand in final, finished tracks. The turnaround time is so tight that there's no time to demo anything: you just do it. They might make a couple of suggestions, but you usually only have a couple of days from the time you get a script to the time that they need a final DAT. If it's a weekly show and they shoot on Thursday, sometimes the script isn't even finished until Monday, so you find yourself making these last-minute revisions, and it's always incredibly pressured. But it's fun because you don't really have time to get into a creative block —you're forced to deliver, so it kind of eliminates the sense of staring at a blank page.
Tell me about your life as a record executive.
I'm a 'principal' (chuckles) of Scratchie Records. Everyone sort of does a little bit of everything. There's a guy named Jeremy Freeman who does the day-to-day operations of the label, but I'm as involved as I can be in a lot of different elements, whether it's helping to get the records made, or marketing, or going up to Mercury's priority meetings and fighting for our records. We've only put out two records, so it's early yet. Is it strange seeing things from one side as an artist, and now seeing them from the other side as a 'principal'?
It is, but it's also really useful because there are no illusions about how the mechanics of a record company work. I've found it to be incredibly enlightening in a way. I think the most obvious thing is, when you're in a band, everyone's afraid to say anything negative to you. Your record can be a complete disaster, and no one will ever tell you! They'll always try to find something positive to say, 'Oh, you got a four-star review in the Wichita Gazette,' rather than 'You sold one record this week and no radio stations will play you.' So when you're on the label side, you get more straight information about what's really happening on a daily basis, and you understand what the record company needs in order to get things going. I think it's definitely helped in terms of perceiving what's happening with my own bands. I've learned to ask more specific questions, and if you ask, people will tell you the truth. But for the most part, people don't like to 'talk business with the artist,' and conversely, people don't like it when the artist tries to talk business with them. I've found that a lot of times record company people get turned off when you as a band member call them up and say 'Why aren't you doing this or that,' it puts a bad taste in their mouth. And that's why managers are so important, you need an intermediary. I've learned to ask more specific questions, and if you ask, people will tell you the truth.
What determines whether a song you write will become a Fountains song or an Ivy song or a TV theme or...
I'm always writing for a specific thing before I start. I don't usually write in a vacuum and then decide later what it sounds like, and it's not like I've got lots of stuff lying around and I'm waiting for opportunities to place it.
Is there anything you're working on that we haven't talked about?
I did a song with [Atlantic labelmate] Jill Sobule that we recorded two days ago, just the two of us. She had some lyrics and I helped to shape them into a song, and then we went in the next day and recorded it —a two-day process from start to finish, it was very satisfying! I really like the song —I think it's called 'Happy' —but I don't know what's going to happen with it. She just went down to Nashville to mix her album and she took the tape with her! And with Ivy, we recently finished our new album. We wanted to get it out in the spring, but I don't think that's gonna happen, so I guess the soonest would be this summer.
How did you get started in music?
I started taking piano lessons when I was about 5, and there was always a lot of music in my family: my parents both play instruments, my grandparents were classical violinists, and my grandfather was actually a music professor and a conductor. As I got older, I figured that playing music was better than not playing music, and I would probably be happier doing it —no matter what area it was in —than if I was doing something else for a living. So I've always tried to be involved in a lot of different things at once. The nature of the music business is such that it's better to have a few chances for some things to be successful than just one, and that's kind of been my attitude all along. As I got older, I figured that playing music was better than not playing music...
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