M&SR: What’s the next piece of gear you want to buy?
Schlesinger: I always tell myself I’m going to buy some nicer basses, and then I never do. I’m just too cheap, I think (laughs). I was given a Rickenbacker bass as a present by one of the guys in the band America because he knew that I was coveting one for a long time. When we were finished working with them, as a present he gave me his. So he saved me, again, from having to spend any of my own money, but he gave me a really nice ’74 Rickenbacker.

M&SR: You started Fountains of Wayne when you were in college?
Schlesinger: Not exactly. I started playing music with Chris Collingwood, who’s the other songwriter and the lead singer of Fountains of Wayne. We went to college together and we started playing then, but as Fountains of Wayne it didn’t actually start until 1996-ish. We played in a bunch of bands before that with different names. It was essentially the same thing. It was the two of us just writing songs and playing together.

M&SR: What are some of your favorite memories from that period, when you were just getting started, got your first record contract, etc?
Schlesinger: Well we went through a lot of kind of false starts. We played together in college just kind of casually. Then we got out of college and we started playing around in Boston, and then a little bit in New York. This was before it was called Fountains of Wayne. We were actually called The Wallflowers at the beginning, and then we had to sell that name to Jakob Dylan for his Wallflowers. Then we were called Pinwheel for a while. But anyway, we signed a little indie record deal with a company that never really got off the ground and our record never came out. The company went bankrupt. It was sort of a big mess for a couple of years until we got really despondent about the whole thing and really stopped trying for a while and did other things. Then we got back together in ’95 and started working on the stuff that would be Fountains of Wayne.

M&SR: Is there any particular song or album you worked on that you’re most fond of?
Schlesinger: It’s hard for me to say one particular thing over anything else. I mean, I actually was really proud that we pulled our last record together, which is called Welcome Interstate Managers. That was a point where we had lost a record deal and we just didn’t really know if we wanted to keep doing it and it was sort of a little bit of another dark period for us. I think, despite it, we managed to pull a good record together and it turned things around for us. So I was very proud of the fact that that happened and it didn’t just all fall apart.

(continued...)