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Often, you only need to hear a few lines to know you're listening to a Fountains of Wayne song. "Richie and Ruben," from the new album _Sky Full of Holes_, introduces its
title characters as the kind of hapless losers the band loves to write about: "They opened up a bar called Living Hell / Right from the start, it didn't go too well / They
didn't have the vibe or quite the right clientele." Irony and wry humor have helped power Fountains of Wayne for about 15 years now. The band was started by songwriters Adam
Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood, who play bass and rhythm guitar, respectively (Collingwood also sings lead vocals). Speaking with _All Things Considered_ host Melissa Block, the two say
that, while their lyrics tend to explore modern themes, the music often reaches back to familiar sounds. "We love all this music from different classic eras of pop songwriting —
'60s, '70s, '80s and the '90s stuff that was going on when we started the band," Schlesinger says. "So we genre-hop in the sense that we incorporate all these
different eras and try to put our own spin on them." "Acela," from _Sky Full of Holes_, has a bluesy pop sound that can be traced back to The Beatles. Collingwood says
that's less a conscious tribute than the natural result of shared musical knowledge within the group, which also includes drummer Brian Young and guitarist Jody Porter. "When you
bring a song like that in, and you're trying to describe to the band what you want it to sound like, it's got all the obvious reference points for things that Brian and Jody are
just as familiar with as we are," Collingwood says. "A lot of it just kind of falls into place, based on what your common experience is of those early songs."
"There's times where Chris or I will bring in a song and we'll pretty much have it mapped out in our mind already," Schlesinger says. "But there's other songs
where we really just bring in the melody and some chord changes, and it takes on its own life in the studio." "Action Hero" is a case in point: a simple song transformed by
its full-band treatment on the album. A steady rhythmic beat and the faint beeping of a keyboard illustrate the story of a downtrodden dreamer who spends half the song hooked up to a heart
monitor. "I seem to remember that the heartbeat sound, which is some kind of muffled kick drum, wasn't there to begin with," Collingwood says. "And now, when I listen
back to that, it strikes me as a really central part of that arrangement." Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.