Circle Centre Mall
Fountains of Wayne / downtown revitalization / imagining what it's like to be British
This is a newsletter about music. I’ve been wanting to start it for a while and finally decided to during this quarantine, both because I have time and because I want to write about something that exists outside of the present moment and more importantly is not coronavirus. The unfortunate irony is that a coronavirus casualty provided the kick in the ass that got this started, but I promise we’ll escape from reality soon.
Earlier today, Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne passed away from coronavirus at age 52. The self-titled debut FOW album came out in 1996 and was one of the first ten CDs I ever owned (actually the twelfth—I have a Word doc that lists them all in chronological purchase order). I vividly remember buying the album from the Sam Goody at the Circle Centre Mall in Indianapolis, which had opened a year prior in 1995 and transformed the city’s sleepy downtown into an appealing destination (although I honestly don’t know what downtown Indy was like before that). There was an arcade on the fourth level that was extremely mid-90s and the obvious draw for someone my age, complete with one of those movie theaters where the seats jerked you around to simulate flying.
Tonight I paused whatever non-activity I would have been up to and went down an FOT rabbit hole, like I did when Kobe died. Their eponymous debut and Utopia Parkway still slap. I read this 1999 article in which a NYT reporter drives around New York City with the band, talking about places in the city that relate to their music. They wrote most of the first album on napkins in a booth at West Village bar WXOU Radio, or so they claim (remember bars?). Schlesinger says, “When we were teen-agers, we liked listening to Kinks records because we'd never been to England, and we got a sense of what it was like to live there.” That resonated with me because in 1996, to my teenage self, Fountains of Wayne sounded quite British despite being suburban Americans who were only 15 years ahead of me, partaking of the grand Anglophilic power pop tradition that I mostly recognized from Oasis at the time, and demonstrating what it was like to imagine what it was like to live in England. Both Fountains of Wayne and the gleaming Circle Centre Mall, which felt cosmopolitan in comparison with everything else in my environment, provided different kinds of portals to some version of an outside world that I couldn’t otherwise access. They stayed one step ahead of me, though: The songs on Utopia Parkway, their next album, were all about suburbs and malls. RIP.