Robbie Fulks-Fountains of Wayne Hotline
ā??Fountains of Wayne Hotlineā? originated as a travel game in our van. ā??Welcome Interstate Managersā? had just come out, and I guess it was the bandā??s super-competency and amazing consistency that made me imagine them as operators of a crisis hotline for songwriters. In our game one of us would place an emergency call for counseling, and a member of a large bureaucratic labyrinth, usually harried and gruff, would offer a solution based on time-honored Fountains of Wayne techniques. Grant, our guitarist, excelled at the mean-spirited drones, and occasionally a different kind of Hotline character would pop up, like one of the perky-beyond-all-reason types that were drummer Geraldā??s specialty. Just another of those things that turns grimly incomprehensible in the tellingā?¦but, for whatever reason, it was amusing enough that I codified it as a song a little while later.
We played it for a couple months at shows, and people plainly liked it. But it was soon time to retire it. Remember how Stravinsky was dogged all his days by "Sacre du Printemps" -- we didn't want that! I did want to have something to remember it by, however. So we put down a version in our friend Jay O'Rourke's garage. Soon all kinds of people were asking for copies, such as -- in a particularly vehement request -- a team of able-bodied lawyers representing the real-life Fountains of Wayne. But it has all ended well, with the band liking the song, us still never having to perform it live, and this MP3 that is now available for your listening pleasure.
Says FOUNTAIN OF WAYNE'S Adam Schlesinger:
"If Robbie Fulks wants to ride someone's coattails, he ought to pick someone more famous than us. We, for example, cover Britney Spears songs to get attention. But hey, we're still flattered. In fact, we might hire him to write our next album for us."
