April 2004, Sunfest, West Palm Beach, Fla.
I can’t say I’m a huge fan of Fountains of Wayne overall, but I am a huge fan of one of their albums — and sometimes that’s all you need. I’d like to go to concerts and be able to enthrall in every song a band plays, but there’s a limited number of bands I can do that with (R.E.M. certainly, Radiohead most likely, Pixies). Oftentimes, I’m there to hear a handful of songs I enjoy and perhaps find others I’m not too familiar with. Music is a constant learning process
Welcome Interstate Managers, the third album from Fountains of Wayne, is a masterpiece from start to finish. It doesn’t hit any wrong notes, the songs meld into one another but there’s a variation of tempos allowing the album to breathe in several directions. Sure it’s best known for “Stacy’s Mom,” a solid song that’s a direct homage to The Cars, but there are six or seven better songs on the album.
By the time I heard the band was coming to Sunfest, the annual music festival in West Palm Beach, I fully enveloped Welcome Interstate Managers into my memory banks. I didn’t really listen to the band’s previous albums (there was no Spotify a decade ago), so there was an element of finding new songs of theirs to explore.
The band was slated to be one of the first bands to play the five-day festival, and I got to the general admission area early to ensure I’d get a good seat. Turns out I didn’t need to be so urgent — most South Florida music crowds are tepid and late arriving, there to be seen more than to see the bands in front of them. I sometimes wonder how I became so attached to music since my family never really cared about it and the town I grew up in had no real scene to cull from. A story for another time.
The guys took the stage to a sparse but steadily growing crowd, and on a breezy, warm late afternoon had some fun with it. Lead singer Chris Collingwood was in good spirits — there are worse ways to make a living — and brought verve and gusto to “Mexican Wine” and “Stacy’s Mom”. I didn’t realize “Sink to the Bottom” was one of their songs, so that was a treat, and when the trio of songs “Hackensack,” “Winter Valley Song” and “Hey Julie” was played, I deemed the show an overwhelming success.
Since it was a festival show (Fuel was to follow the band, I did not stay for Fuel), the setlist was shorter. But in a little over an hour, Fountains of Wayne solidified their status in my mind as a band to constantly seek out. Of course the band didn’t repeat the success of Welcome Interstate Managers, but that’s OK — it can always look back and say it achieved one album of utter greatness.
