With the TV stuff, we usually hand in final, finished tracks. The turnaround time is so tight that there’s no time to demo anything; you just do it. – Adam Schlesinger
Your job as a producer is to make suggestions without putting your ego in front of everything else. Also, I think you want to focus on that artist’s best qualities and really highlight them. – Adam Schlesinger
Every year, there’s some band that plays guitar-oriented pop music that has a single, but for the most part, it’s kind of relegated to the sidelines. – Adam Schlesinger
I tend to write songs that are about something pretty specific. A lot of them tell some kind of little made-up story. – Adam Schlesinger
I don’t know if there’s a particular project, but one movie that I was really disappointed I didn’t get to work on was Judd Apatow’s ‘Walk Hard.’ – Adam Schlesinger
With Fountains Of Wayne, I almost always start with lyrics – maybe not the entire lyric, but I almost always need a couplet or something, and then I work from there. With Ivy, it’s much more about the atmosphere and the vibe. – Adam Schlesinger
I think when we were starting out, it was more about imitating our songwriting heroes. We would try to write songs like Neil Finn, or we would try to write songs like Ray Davies, or we would try to write songs like Glenn Tilbrook. – Adam Schlesinger
I think people sometimes confuse ‘catchy’ with something that should automatically be a hit in today’s world. I mean, obviously we write a lot of stuff that’s catchy, that sticks in your head. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that middle-school kids are going to want to listen to a song about a lawyer or a Subaru or whatever. – Adam Schlesinger
Really, music is what I’m interested in, and the lyric part of it came from just having to have something to sing. – Adam Schlesinger
The nature of the music business is such that it’s better to have a few chances for some things to be successful than just one, and that’s kind of been my attitude all along. – Adam Schlesinger
For me, it’s just more satisfying when you follow the rules rather than just make a bunch of sounds. The magic of just making noise in the studio goes away after a while. – Adam Schlesinger
I’ve never really had the desire to be a front person or a solo artist. I don’t really create that much of a hierarchy in my mind. – Adam Schlesinger
I think I initially started inventing characters in my songs because I didn’t want to write directly about myself. Also, as a kid, I loved all the character names in Beatles songs, like Eleanor Rigby and Lovely Rita and Mean Mr. Mustard and Maxwell and Rocky Raccoon. – Adam Schlesinger
Bands like R.E.M. and even The Replacements, during that initial wave of college rock, would sell 40, 50, 100,000 copies of a record, and that would be seen as extremely successful – and definitely enough to keep doing more. – Adam Schlesinger
Andy Chase and I were keyboard players originally, and we became guitarists later. But it’s fun for us to focus more on the keyboard stuff sometimes. – Adam Schlesinger
Either I need an assignment with a strict deadline – like something for a movie or a TV show or whatever – or else I need to create a made-up deadline for myself for my own records. Otherwise, I don’t write anything. – Adam Schlesinger
I started taking piano lessons when I was about 5, and there was always a lot of music in my family: my parents both play instruments, my grandparents were classical violinists, and my grandfather was actually a music professor and a conductor. – Adam Schlesinger
The Ting Tings have been a huge hit in my family. I have two young daughters, and both of them love that record, so I pretty much have to listen to that ten times a day. – Adam Schlesinger
Coachella is a magnet for music-biz luminaries such as Tara Reid, Paris Hilton, and Cameron Diaz. – Adam Schlesinger
I always have to be thinking about who’s going to be singing this song, what the context is. I don’t sit around just writing in a vacuum, ever. – Adam Schlesinger
Saxon, if you are unfamiliar, is a British heavy-metal band that has been around since the mid-’70s and was in no small part the inspiration for Spinal Tap. – Adam Schlesinger
Most of the jobs I’ve gotten are from people calling me. I don’t actively solicit a lot of work like that, but maybe I should. – Adam Schlesinger
Making your own records is really satisfying in the sense that you more or less get to do what you want. It may not sell or whatever, but on an artistic level, the only people that you really have to fight with are the people in your own band. – Adam Schlesinger
As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time. – Adam Schlesinger
In the ’80s, they were using an awful lot of technology but hadn’t really figured out how it worked yet… You had these really great, simple pop songs turned into these gigantic overproductions. – Adam Schlesinger
