Fountains of Wayne

As the bassist and one of the songwriters of the smart pop group Fountains of Wayne, Adam Schlesinger has proven himself a master of the cleverly catchy on albums such as Utopia Parkway and Welcome Interstate Managers, which yielded the Cars-crazy hit single "Stacey's Mom." Schlesinger's mastery of pop idioms attracted the attention of Tom Hanks when he needed an original song for his one-hit Wonders to make a name with in his '60s-set rock film That Thing You Do! Since then Schlesinger's work has been gaining Hollywood prominence; FOW songs pop up regularly in both TV shows and movies; his other band, chanteuse-fronted cool-pop masters Ivy, had the only credible number on the all-Steely-Dan-covers Me Myself and Irene soundtrack; and Schlesinger recently wrote several of the songs for the romantic comedy Music and Lyrics, in which Hugh Grant plays a washed-up '80s singer whose unlikely partnership with reluctant wordsmith Drew Barrymore leads to success and maybe love. (The movie debuts on DVD today.) We spoke to Schlesinger between the theatrical release of M&L and the record store release of FOW's excellent new disc, Traffic and Weather. Both the movie and the record have referents to '80s sounds. The function is parodic in the former, and more of an homage in the latter. I asked Schlesinger about the aesthetic and technical choices that inform the distinction. "There's always a judgment call. I mean for a song like 'Meaningless Kiss' for the movie, I mean that was supposed to be as kind of cheesy as we could make it and we really did try to go for a sort of outdated reverb sounds and synth drum sounds and all that kind of stuff. For my own bands, I mean I think more often than not we try to keep it a little more subtle and not just make it a big joke. Maybe there's something in there that reminds you of something. But we try to not cross that line into parody."

Premiere: I was wondering what the process of writing these songs that had to fit into the film in vary particular ways was like. And also how, and at what stage, vice-versa, the elements of the narrative got incorporated into something like the climactic song, "Don't Write Me Off."

• Music and Lyrics review • Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant Q&A

Schlesinger: I ended up writing three songs for the film; the two that are sort of more contemporary ones, "Don't Write Me Off" and "Way Back into Love," I had to work much more closely with [writer/director] Mark Lawrence to make sure that the songs were saying what he wanted to say in the script. "Meaningless Kiss," one of the '80s hits by Hugh's character, was really just an 80's pastiche kind of thing. So that was a little bit of an easier assignment. With "Way Back into Love" and with "Don't Write Me Off," Mark and I had a lot of discussions about what was supposed to be accomplished by those songs. And we went back and forth on them quite a bit. "Way Back into Love" was actually the most complicated one just because it's a weird triangle of characters that has to perform that song throughout the movie. Drew and Hugh's characters have to be working on it together and then there's this point sort of in the second act where they have this fight, and there has to be this third verse that reflects the fight they've been having. And then at the end of the movie it has to be sung by Hugh and Haley's character [Haley Bennett plays a Britney-esque singer named Cora Corman who commissions Grant's character to write a song for her], and so it couldn't just be sort of a straight one-on-one love song. It couldn't be seen as Hugh singing "I love you" to Haley, because that's not what happens in the movie. So we came up with this idea of making it this more general idea of love as some kind of life force.