The Song Fight Bulletin Board

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/musi ... us-975786/

Adam Schlesinger, co-founder of the New Jersey power-pop group Fountains of Wayne and Emmy- and Grammy-winning songwriter for film, television, and theater, died Wednesday from complications related to COVID-19. He was 52.

I saw a lot of folks post on social media about Adam Schlesinger's passing. Sounds like he was a huge influence on a lot of people who've participated in Song Fight over the years. He seemed like somebody who would have liked the idea of Song Fight, considering how prolific he was and how he could write great songs in so many genres. I actually had not realized that he was the third person working on the songs for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (with Rachel Bloom and Jack Dolgan) until his COVID-19 diagnosis hit the news.

It's so sad. I love Fountains of Wayne and they're much more than just "Stacy's Mom."

I remember hearing that Adam and Chris Collingwood would play songfight with each other, suggesting unwritable titles for each other.

This one hit me hard as his breadth of projects and output was aspirational.

I don't even really know his work with Fountains of Wayne (other than the ubiquitous "Stacy's Mom") or his other bands, but his work for movies and TV makes for an impressive resume in its own right - for "That Thing You Do" and "Music and Lyrics" he had the daunting task of writing songs that could believably be huge hits - and stand up to repeated hearing throughout the movie!



And for "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend", one of my favorite TV shows, he collaborated on over 150 songs over the show's 4-year run.



NPR Music's Stephen Thompson wrote a very nice tribute to him this morning: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/02/82574794 ... laborators

He def had skills. And, yeah, I say that as a guy from northern NJ who used to live in NYC, like he did, and got a lot of FoW’s inside jokes and references. It was cool to see somebody like him make an actual career out of songsmithing beyond a middling rock career, contributing to TV, Movies and Broadway.

His brief foray with the (modestly super) group Tinted Windows is definitely very underrated. He wrote both of these tunes.





He was a co-writer on this, which is pretty amazing.

Man, this is really sad. Such a great talent to lose so young.

As FoW sang once, “It’s not right, it’s not fair”

Rest in peace.