Yesterday’s classic power pop song of the day was “My Best Friend’s Girl” and today’s song is strongly inspired by that and other songs by the Cars. Today’s song is “Stacy’s Mom” by Fountains of Wayne and it sounds like a Cars song had the Cars still been recording songs in the early 2000s, except maybe a little catchier.
“Stacy’s Mom” was written by Fountains of Wayne front men Chris Collingwood and the late, great Adam Schlesinger. The group included it on their 2003 album, Welcome Interstate Managers (a fine, fine album full of hook-laden tunes), and released it as a single in May of that year. The track, a definite Cars pastiche, rose to #21 on the Billboard Hot 100, #20 on Billboard’s Adult Top 40, and #3 on Billboard’s Mainstream Top 40 charts. It was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Vocal Pop Performance, losing for some unknown reason to No Doubt’s “Underneath It All.”
Here’s what Mr. Schlesinger remembered about writing “Stacy’s Mom:”
“One of my best friends, when we were maybe 11 or 12, came to me and announced that he thought my grandmother was hot. And I said, ‘Hey, you’re stepping over the line,’ but at that point in life, I wouldn’t put it past anyone… I was thinking a little bit about [Simon & Garfunkel’s] ‘Mrs. Robinson’ and sonically I was thinking about the Cars, a Rick Springfield [‘Jessie’s Girl‘] sort of thing.”
The Cars influence is significant. Schlesinger said he “owes a debt” to the Cars’ “Just What I Needed,” and that’s definitely the case. In fact, that debt was so precise that when Ric Ocasek first heard “Stacy’s Mom” he though the guitar intro was actually a sample from the Cars tune. Adam and Chris showed some real love for the older group and the music of twenty years prior and that made for one terrific tune.
The success of “Stacy’s Mom” was no doubt helped by the sexy video the group put out in support of the song. The video follows a young lad’s comic antics trying to get noticed by his teenaged girlfriend’s milfalistic mother, played by model Rachel Hunter. It’s worth watching even if you don’t like the song.
But who doesn’t like “Stacy’s Mom?” It’s a bouncy, catchy, imminently singable piece of New Wavish power pop, one of the best tracks of the past several decades. It is harmonically simple (the chorus is just I – IV – V – I, or E – A – B – A in the key of E) but the melody has hooks galore, which you expect from Mr. Schlesinger and Fountains of Wayne. This is the guy, after all, who penned the tune “That Thing You Do!” from the Tom Hanks 1996 movie of the same name.
Unfortunately, Adams Schlesinger was an early victim of COVID-19 and passed away in April of 2020. He was just 52 years old, but before then he definitely knew how to write some catchy tunes. He is missed.
