Adam Schlesinger
Schlesinger was the co-founder of Fountains Of Wayne, a band I was very fond of (and named after a lawn ornament store not far from where I lived, that I went by hundreds of times). I've written about some of their albums: Traffic And Weather, Utopia P.arkway, and Sky Full Of Holes. All of these albums were celebrations of suburbia, whether it be malls, commuting, careers in middle management, or Cracker Barrels. He had side projects with bands called Ivy and Tinted Windows, which I've always been meaning to check out.
But as obituaries of Schlesinger have shown, he had a much wider impact on music. He was not an EGOT winner, but he did have nominations in all four categories. He won Emmys for writing songs for Sesame Street and the Tony Awards show, as well as getting nominated for songs written for the series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (I heard him in an interview and he wrote dozens of songs for that show, as each episode had at least one original song).
He wrote the score for the Broadway show Cry-Baby, based on the John Waters film, and was working on a musical The Bed-Wetter, based on a memoir by Sarah Silverman. He was also nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globe for the title song for That Thing You Do, the Tom Hanks directed film about a one-hit wonder in the '60s. As a friend of mine wrote, that was a brilliant piece of writing, because it had to sound like a song from the period, and be good enough that it could have been a hit, and you had to like it because you heard it a lot during the movie.
Schlesinger, in some ways, was like a throwback to the days of Tin Pan Alley. He could write songs suitable for any occasion. But most of his songs had a wistful quality, and had elements of the British Invasion and power-pop of any decade. His loss is tremendous.
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