Mirror Ball Tears & Sequin Dreams, Pt. 1
Dames Nationals, as we did on Juneteenth, we’re bring you another Mega Content Weekend— three issues! Tonight: a Double Dame Endorsement and a report from a Special Dames Correspondent. Tomorrow morning: Sophie’s links! And Sunday morning: Margaret’s! It’s enough to make you dance for joy (we hope)!
Double Dames Endorsement: Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure
Challenge, Hollywood: give Oscar Isaac a movie where he dances with no sinister undertones.
We Your Dames have been thinking for a while that disco is making a long-overdue comeback, and with the releases of nouveau disco albums by Dua Lipa, Doja Cat, and now Jessie Ware*, we can feel in our bones it’s really happening. And not a moment too soon, in our correct opinion!
Jessie Ware’s new album What’s Your Pleasure? is our current favorite. Here’s why: it’s a breathy, fun, soulful, lightly funky ass-shaking delight, start to finish. Jessie’s assured, light-yet-smoky vocals establish her as an heir to disco divas like Thelma Houston, Donna Summer, and Evelyn Champagne King,and even the likes of Sheila E. and Janet Jackson. The production owes a lot to Nile Rodgers’ iconic work with everyone from CHIC and Sister Sledge to Daft Punk, and close listening will be rewarded with spotting sonic allusions to DeBarge, Rick James and Teena Marie, and (a little out of left field, ok, but trust us) Portishead.
We are love love loving What’s Your Pleasure? And can’t wait to hear what your favorite tracks and musical Easter eggs are! For a deep dive into the continuing project of reclaiming and recontextualizing disco as a genre worthy of not just love but sincere respect, we recommend Naima Cochrane’s 2019 piece for VIBE on how Disco Demolition Night Sparked an Evolution in Black Music.
*and probably many others we haven’t heard yet, please do let us know who else we should be listening to in this category!
To look this good AND move this well: SHOULD it even be legal?
Reminder: Join Dame Margaret on a Virtual 3-Day Jane Austen Slumber Party
This August, Dame Margaret will be leading a virtual Pride & Prejudice pilgrimage where, for three days, she and a group of fellow Austen devotees will (1) closely analyze why Pride & Prejudice is so uniquely satisfying and (2) think about how we can use its fictional insights to direct our own lives now. She can guarantee both fire insights like the one quoted above and goofy nonsense like the tweet that follows— an ideal mix!! Give yourself something to look forward to this summer and join her!
Special Dames Correspondent: Gabe Rosenberg on Adam Schlesinger & “Saving For A Custom Van”
This week, we are bringing you something special, as a treat: an essay on the late Adam Schlesinger from our friend Gabe Rosenberg— digital editor for WOSU in Columbus, OH, tremendously rewarding Twitter follow, and maker of excellent Spotify playlists (praised in these pages previously). This essay made us cry, clutch our hearts, and dust off Fountains of Wayne albums even our recent grief had not yet led us to dig out. We hope it hits you the same way. Without further ado:
There's an inevitable moment that comes somewhere in the middle of every Fountains of Wayne concert (man, remember concerts?). It's late into the New Jersey band's decade-and-a-half run, and the quartet launches into the whirring guitar vamp of "Radiation Vibe." That song, which open their 1996 self-titled debut, is immediately recognizable as FOW. All guitar feedback, tight backing harmonies, the impossible-to-unhear "baby baby baby" hook.
"Radiation Vibe" hits the favorite touchstones of the band's two songwriters, Chris Collingwood (guitar and vocals) and Adam Schlesinger (bass and backup vocals). You've got Beatles psychedelia a la The Cars new-wave, through the distortion of Weezer power-pop. Here's an Americana travelogue, a girl who's unappreciated by her guy, a lovable loser doing the best with what he has.
When the song appeared at shows, as it always would, they'd hit the long vamp right after the second chorus and stay there—huddle, talk amongst themselves—then launch into any number of cover songs stored in their back pocket. The band would speed through three, maybe four tributes, before jumping back into the final chorus of "Radiation Vibe." There was no divine inspiration here: FOW always paid tribute to their idols, and wore their influences proudly.
So it's disconcerting now to hear this song performed not by FOW but Kay Hanley—frontwoman for Letters From Cleo, that '90s romcom soundtrack mainstay—in the context of a posthumous tribute to Adam Schlesinger.
Schlesinger died in April from COVID-19, and Hanley's version comes as part of a new covers record, Saving For A Custom Van, that's as much a public wake as we'll get while this pandemic forges on.
I wish it weren't so hard to listen to Fountains of Wayne right now. I've been a FOW die-hard, a "Stacy's Mom" defender, a Schlesinger completist ever since hearing Welcome Interstate Managers—their magnum opus, if you believe a power pop band can have such a thing, and I do—bleeding from the stereo of my mom's Honda Odyssey. They were funny and scathing and catchy, and they wrote about the suburbs, just like the one I grew up in.
When I wasn't yet 18, I volunteered at a Pittsburgh music festival in order to hear FOW headline; I saw the band once more after that, on the power of my new ID. I introduced everyone I could to That Thing You Do, in which Schlesinger's titular song is blissfully inescapable, and bragged about his contributions to film soundtracks and the Tony Award telecasts like they were my own. I savored every episode of Crazy Ex Girlfriend, the ambitious musical TV show with Schlesinger behind the scenes as head music producer. And I drifted, unmoored, for two days after he died.
Months later, when his loss still feels so personal, Saving For A Custom Van plays like a shot back at the universe. In one of my favorite obits of Schlesinger, Stephen Thompson of NPR called him "one of pop's great collaborators." A true team player, who wrote best not for his own name but for others. It's endearing – and occasionally devastating – to hear the tables turn.
The remembrances are many. Jody Porter, FOW's longtime guitarist, brings a woozy cover of "Four In The Morning" from Schlesinger's dream-pop project Ivy. The comedian Sarah Silverman, whose musical The Bedwetter featured his music and lyrics, teams up with Ben Lee for a schmaltzy rendition of "Way Back Into Love," Schlesinger's criminally-underrated centerpiece for the movie Music & Lyrics. Christian Lee Hutson, a favorite singer-songwriter of mine with a penchant for introspection, turns "Red Dragon Tattoo" into a somber, acoustic affair.
With 31 tracks, there's a lot of variety. (And yet, nobody touches his power pop supergroup Tinted Windows, the one with Taylor Hanson? Not even "Kind Of A Girl"?) But the most successful songs bring a new perspective to Schlesinger's character-rich stories.
For "Just The Girl," a Top 40 hit written for The Click 5, the pop punk band Remember Sports takes down the tempo and fuzzes out the synths until it just oozes angst. Sad13 (the poet and Speedy Ortiz frontwoman Sadie Dupuis) excavates all the suburban malaise from FOW's "A Fine Day For A Parade." Charly Bliss so confidently sells "Pretend To Be Nice," which Schlesinger wrote for Josie And The Pussycats, it's hard to believe it wasn't theirs.
Of course, Saving For A Custom Van was always going to have a cover of "Stacy's Mom," the band's biggest hit and the song forever tied to Schlesinger's name. To some fans, it's a fluke. A shame, really, to steal attention from the more deserving of their catalog. But I don't think that gives it enough credit for what it is: A perfect pop song.
The task appropriately falls to Rachel Bloom, the star and creator of Crazy Ex Girlfriend, and Schlesinger's close friend. Her version is slower, loungier, full of vibrato and not at all self-serious. More Cabaret than The Cars, like she's playing the crowd at a hotel bar. "You know, I'm not the little girl that I used to be," Bloom flips. "I'm all grown up now, baby, can't you see?"
I spoke with Adam Schlesinger for a music blog once, in 2015. I was in college and FOW hadn't released an album in four years, so his publicist was pretty confused when I called. I wanted to ask how he wrote characters with such empathy, when the subjects he gravitated towards—office workers and suburban living and traffic and weather—didn't exactly inspire romance in most. Why these losers? Why these dead-end malls and cul-de-sacs? "We just focused on a setting that felt comfortable to us, and we keep going back to it," Schlesinger told me.
"Stacy's Mom" has always winked at its own ridiculousness. Here's a teenager, pursuing lust in denial of reality. Who knows what he's doing is doomed, is wrong, yet couldn't be subtle if his life depended on it. Whose all-too-brief summer is spent mowing lawns, sitting by the pool, and escaping into fantasy. In that way, "Stacy's Mom" is the purest distillation of Schlesinger's music. There's melancholy in every witty observation, self-loathing in each snarky retort, and still, a determination there's something better on the other side of these endless humid days.
As the guitar solo ends and Bloom rounds into the anthemic final chorus, she takes one last liberty with Schlesinger's words. "I know it might be wrong, but I'm in love"—Bloom savors every word—"with Stacy's hot-ass motherfucking mom."
I imagine Bloom singing this to Schlesinger in the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend writer's room, while stuck on a particularly tough verse. Or maybe they just wrapped the season, and went out drinking at a karaoke bar. I imagine Schlesinger resisting the push to go onstage—he always preferred standing to the side. I imagine Bloom, gripping the microphone triumphantly, looking right at him as she sang. I imagine it made him laugh.
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