{"id":853,"date":"2018-03-27T02:12:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-27T02:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/?p=853"},"modified":"2026-06-27T02:14:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T02:14:08","slug":"fountains-of-wayne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/?p=853","title":{"rendered":"Fountains of Wayne"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

April 2004, Sunfest, West Palm Beach, Fla.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t say I\u2019m a huge fan of Fountains of Wayne overall, but I am a huge fan of one of their albums \u2014 and sometimes that\u2019s all you need. I\u2019d like to go to concerts and be able to enthrall in every song a band plays, but there\u2019s a limited number of bands I can do that with (R.E.M. certainly, Radiohead most likely, Pixies). Oftentimes, I\u2019m there to hear a handful of songs I enjoy and perhaps find others I\u2019m not too familiar with. Music is a constant learning process<\/p>\n

Welcome Interstate Managers<\/em>, the third album from Fountains of Wayne, is a masterpiece from start to finish. It doesn\u2019t hit any wrong notes, the songs meld into one another but there\u2019s a variation of tempos allowing the album to breathe in several directions. Sure it\u2019s best known for \u201cStacy\u2019s Mom,\u201d a solid song that\u2019s a direct homage to The Cars, but there are six or seven better songs on the album.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> into my memory banks. I didn\u2019t really listen to the band\u2019s previous albums (there was no Spotify a decade ago), so there was an element of finding new songs of theirs to explore.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d get a good seat. Turns out I didn\u2019t need to be so urgent \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 there are worse ways to make a living \u2014 and brought verve and gusto to \u201cMexican Wine\u201d and \u201cStacy\u2019s Mom\u201d. I didn\u2019t realize \u201cSink to the Bottom\u201d was one of their songs, so that was a treat, and when the trio of songs \u201cHackensack,\u201d \u201cWinter Valley Song\u201d and \u201cHey Julie\u201d was played, I deemed the show an overwhelming success.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t repeat the success of Welcome Interstate Managers<\/em>, but that\u2019s OK \u2014 it can always look back and say it achieved one album of utter greatness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

April 2004, Sunfest, West Palm Beach, Fla. I can\u2019t say I\u2019m a huge fan of Fountains of Wayne overall, but I am a huge fan of one of their albums \u2014 and sometimes that\u2019s all you need. I\u2019d like to go to concerts and be able to enthrall in every song a band plays, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":854,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[114],"class_list":["post-853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-concerts","tag-fountains-of-wayne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":855,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853\/revisions\/855"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}