Tinted Windows released one self-titled studio album of mostly Schlesinger-penned tracks. Despite the difficulties, Collingwood says 2011’s “Sky Full of Holes” is his favorite Fountains of Wayne album. “I’ve Got a Feeling” was too subtle for alt-rock radio in 1997, yet it remains ideal for any cocktail hour it happens to glide across. Combining comedy and pathos is hard in any medium, but doing it in a catchy three-minute pop song is nearly impossible. You could do worse than to hear this song’s golden chorus in your head the next time you go to renew your license. The title track, named after a real street in Queens with a name too good not to steal, sums up the major themes. Three years after landing an alt-rock hit with the Collingwood-penned “Radiation Vibe,” Fountains of Wayne returned with a concept album about dead-end suburban ennui that rivals the best of the Kinks. Across four seasons of the CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Schlesinger, Jack Dolgen, and the show’s co-creator and star Rachel Bloom wrote close to 150 original songs in a staggering array of genres and styles, from Broadway to rap to New Jack Swing, all of them catchy, funny, and wholly convincing facsimiles of the genuine article. J.D. Their lavish, cosmopolitan sound placed them at the front of indie-pop style alongside sophisticates like Stereolab, Luna, Black Box Recorder, and St. Etienne, with Durand’s languid Parisian accent giving Schlesinger and Chase’s shimmering songs an enviable air of continental refinement. Fountains of Wayne is one such band. “The Fountains of Wayne are great exponents [of] the perfect pop song, when times were simpler and music was good,” James Iha said in the late Nineties, when Smashing Pumpkins selected the band as openers. Boasting the classic opening line “Sleeping on a planter at the Port Authority/Waiting for my bus to come,” “Bright Future in Sales” is another killer Interstate Managers track, this time about a yuppie who doesn’t seem to realize he’s well on the way to alcoholism. Working alongside Fountains of Wayne co-founder Chris Collingwood, and on his own in assorted side projects and TV and movie gigs, Schlesinger built up an unparalleled catalog of character studies of dreamers, lovers, and total idiots, mostly set in his native New Jersey and the surrounding areas. One of the kickiest pleasures in Fountains of Wayne’s catalog, this supercharged power-pop tune zips along at a breakneck pace that amplifies the romantic anxiety at its heart. Wonderful, a kid who mows her lawn while her mother gets a massage he can’t stop staring at. This tale of a deluded Jersey nobody still pining after a high-school classmate who happened to become famous is so poignant you can feel it in the base of your spine, while still finding room for the line “I saw you talkin’/To Christopher Walken/On my TV screen.” It’s one of the best of the many wistful slice-of-life tales on Welcome Interstate Managers. J.D. The iconic video stars model Rachel Hunter as the mom who picks Stacy up from school in a red convertible as a herd of drooling dudes stand around gawking. ), Here at Rolling Stone, we’re mourning this tragic loss. This list includes every Fountains of Wayne single, but true fans know there are other great songs to vote on besides the radio hits. Like the title track from That Thing You Do!, this ballad has to hold up under repeated performances within the compact running time of the Hugh Grant–Drew Barrymore rom-com Music and Lyrics, where he plays the washed-up half of a Wham!-esque Eighties duo, while she’s his unlikely collaborator on a new song for a contemporary pop star. Is one of your favorite Fountains of Wayne songs missing from this poll? “Richie and Ruben” is the wryly comic tale of two hustling entrepreneurs with way more moxie than good sense. Sign up for our newsletter. Schlesinger also contributed the standout, “Our Own World” — a blast of bright Sixties rapture with a lead vocal from Mickey Dolenz that could’ve been a hit back when the Monkees made their original run. (“Action Hero,” in which a bored middle-aged dad fantasizes about a more exciting life, doubles as a metaphor for Schlesinger’s side career imitating more commercial forms of music.) It is the third track on their third studio album, Welcome Interstate Managers. The result was a wonderful collection of tunes that showcased all the Monkees’ beautifully aged voices. List RulesVote for your favorite Fountains of Wayne songs, not just singles and hits. Every so often, a band comes along that digs back into what pop music is all about -- good, fun tunes. Thankfully, it does. Tinted Windows, “Messing With My Head” (2009). Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, “The Math of Love Triangles” (2016). Add it to the list so it has a chance to rise to the top. (It somehow feels like part of the song’s punchline that Katy Perry mysteriously recorded a weirdly faithful cover of it when she did the revived MTV Unplugged in 2009.) Sky Full of Holes is packed with the bittersweet short stories that were Schlesinger’s stock in trade. There are Fountains of Wayne songs that rock harder (“Little Red Light,” to name one), but the band may not have recorded a more propulsive track than this Utopia Parkway highlight about a dude who takes the N train out to Coney Island in a desperate attempt to impress a girl who doesn’t know he exists. He’s so smitten, it seems, that he can’t say her name without stuttering. It has to work in many iterations, including Grant and Barrymore’s embryonic demo recording and the pop star’s Indian-influenced “steamy and sticky” reinterpretation. (For a mix of spoof parody and pathos in equal measure, try “A Diagnosis,” “You Stupid Bitch,” or “It Was a Shit Show.”) But it’s also a hilarious, note-perfect riff on Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, with Bloom as a breathy air-head trying to use math metaphors to solve a romantic dilemma, much to the dismay of her would-be geometry teachers: “This triangle’s scalene”/“That’s astute”/“So I need to decide which man’s more acute!” A.S. She wore Van Halen T-shirts, rocked heart-shaped sunglasses, and liked to hang around by the po-oo-ol. This time, the story has a happy ending — the guy gets to the front of the line, and Yolanda smiles, or he thinks she does. A highlight from the first Fountains of Wayne album, “Sick Day” is a beautifully melancholic ode to a Jersey girl taking the PATH train into Manhattan to fake her way through another day of temp-job purgatory — “making the scene with her coffee and cream.” It’s simply the greatest song ever written about that sweet, slight moment of post-college, pre-career stasis, when nothing seems necessary, everything seems totally attainable yet weirdly beneath you, and even the dullest 9-to-5 distractions come haloed in “hey, whatever” possibility.