Adam Schlesinger didn’t just understand what made a perfect pop song tick; he could map its genome and replicate it like a mad scientist.
From his early hits with Fountains of Wayne to his work in TV and film and for outside artists, he had a chameleon-like ability to apply his musical understanding to any context. “On an artistic level, the only people that you really have to fight with are the people in your own band,” Schlesinger, who died at 52 Wednesday morning (April 1) of coronavirus complications, told Pop Matters in 2010. “If you're working on a movie or a TV show or something, you're really just trying to deliver what somebody else wants and read their minds.” That musical telepathy not only led to Fountains of Wayne’s No.