Driving to the valley of POLLS: Fountains of Wayne's UTOPIA PARKWAY (An Adam Schlesinger memorial poll)

Yeah Collingwood dominates this one, awkwardly for this memorial poll.

Didn’t know how the songwriting duties broke down when I started the poll, but 8/14 tracks here are Adam’s, so this album is actually balanced in favor of his compositions.

Yeah, personally I was referring to quality, not quantity. :/

But I'm down to poll at least the first three LPs and wasn't trying to dis the poll!

No prob, didn’t take it that way.

As I said, I never knew the songwriting breakdown before, but now that I do...yeah, this was kinda Chris’s record.

I mean, I think the whole Collingwood stretch in the middle of the record is its strongest patch--oddly, with the exception of "Go Hippie," which might be my least favourite track on it.

tbh this band was a bit too sugary sweet for me

you may be missing the lemons

I was gonna say...

Here we are at last
We're running out of gas
The air is getting thick
The girls are feeling sick
We'll pass out on the beach
Our keys just out of reach
And soon we'll say goodbye
Then we'll work until we die

I still enjoy Prom Theme but find it much more ridiculous now than 21 years. The Senator's Daughter closes things off nicely, but that stretch after Amity is pretty filler-tastic. Lost In Space I always assumed was a reject from the film adaptation of that series

(The timing seems bad to make such a statement, but across the board it appears I generally prefer Collingwood's songs)

I'm gonna throw a vote to the title song, which blew me away when I first heard it. I was a middle-school nerd who loved the debut and walked all the way to the mall to buy the cd from Sam Goody on release day. It was the best first song on an anticipated new record I had ever heard at that point.

Sentimental fave is "Troubled Times", natch, but Adam still has more of my fave songs: "Hat and Feet"/"Prom Theme"/"Senator's Daughter" (like "Everything's Ruined" earlier) share a low-key gauzy/vibey quality that he didn't really revisit very much later on

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Just now really needed to listen to this guy.

<3

...and this album is perfect