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The other day, Craven was flying up Highway 6 and 50 toward the mall.
OK, make that attempting to fly up Highway 6 and 50 toward the mall. Actually, Craven was inching, plodding, crawling in the herky-jerk, stop-and-go gridlock that passes for midday traffic on that choked stretch of road these days. And the only thing flying was the invective he hurled ineffectually at the ditz too busy texting her psychic to signal her intention to merge four inches ahead of Craven’s front bumper.
No one can deny that the Grand Valley’s burgeoning population has brought with it some of the problems we might have previously deemed “urban.” You no longer have to live in New York or Los Angeles to worry about traffic, pollution, crime and a gathering pother of street-level crabbiness. And while life in Grand Junction might have once meant close ties to family and neighbors, today you’re as likely to feel the crushing loneliness of modern existence in Orchard Mesa or the Redlands as on the lower east side of Manhattan.
Which is what helps make the Fountains of Wayne relevant to Mesa County’s music buffs.
The Fountains of Wayne — who take their group name from a kitschy New Jersey lawn ornament store that was founded during the 1960s and immortalized on “The Sopranos” — got their start in 1996, although the band’s songwriting principals, Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood, had first come together a decade earlier at Williams College in Massachusetts. Their self-titled debut album, with its crunchy pop rock hooks married to evocative, sometimes melancholy but always clever lyrics about life in the city and suburbs, cast the mold for the band’s subsequent albums like 1999’s “Utopia Parkway” and 2003’s “Welcome Interstate Managers” (the latter of which proved their biggest seller thanks to the inclusion of the radio hit, “Stacy’s Mom”).
For a band sometimes seen as a side project — Schlesinger also does time in the chill-pop trio Ivy, has composed theme songs for TV shows like “The Howard Stern Show” and “Crank Yankers,” has written songs for the recent Drew Barrymore vehicle “Music and Lyrics” as well as the title track from Tom Hanks’ “That Thing You Do!” (for which he received an Oscar nomination), and co-owns a record label and studio with the Smashing Pumpkins’ guitarist James Iha — Fountains of Wayne have established a fervent fan base around the world.
This following has accrued despite the band’s distinctly East Coast flavor. Only Grand Junction’s ex-New Yorkers are likely to get allusions to long-time New York news personalities Chuck Scarborough and Sue Simmons on Fountains of Wayne’s latest album, “Traffic and Weather,” but the tales of urban anomie and ennui told in songs like “Someone to Love” and “New Routine” will translate easily for anyone who ever “puts Coldplay on, pours a glass of wine, curls up with a book about organized crime” or thinks to him- or herself:
“I’m so, I’m so sick of this place
I’m so ready for a change of pace
I’m just looking for a new routine.”
OK, make that attempting to fly up Highway 6 and 50 toward the mall. Actually, Craven was inching, plodding, crawling in the herky-jerk, stop-and-go gridlock that passes for midday traffic on that choked stretch of road these days. And the only thing flying was the invective he hurled ineffectually at the ditz too busy texting her psychic to signal her intention to merge four inches ahead of Craven’s front bumper.
No one can deny that the Grand Valley’s burgeoning population has brought with it some of the problems we might have previously deemed “urban.” You no longer have to live in New York or Los Angeles to worry about traffic, pollution, crime and a gathering pother of street-level crabbiness. And while life in Grand Junction might have once meant close ties to family and neighbors, today you’re as likely to feel the crushing loneliness of modern existence in Orchard Mesa or the Redlands as on the lower east side of Manhattan.
Which is what helps make the Fountains of Wayne relevant to Mesa County’s music buffs.
The Fountains of Wayne — who take their group name from a kitschy New Jersey lawn ornament store that was founded during the 1960s and immortalized on “The Sopranos” — got their start in 1996, although the band’s songwriting principals, Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood, had first come together a decade earlier at Williams College in Massachusetts. Their self-titled debut album, with its crunchy pop rock hooks married to evocative, sometimes melancholy but always clever lyrics about life in the city and suburbs, cast the mold for the band’s subsequent albums like 1999’s “Utopia Parkway” and 2003’s “Welcome Interstate Managers” (the latter of which proved their biggest seller thanks to the inclusion of the radio hit, “Stacy’s Mom”).
For a band sometimes seen as a side project — Schlesinger also does time in the chill-pop trio Ivy, has composed theme songs for TV shows like “The Howard Stern Show” and “Crank Yankers,” has written songs for the recent Drew Barrymore vehicle “Music and Lyrics” as well as the title track from Tom Hanks’ “That Thing You Do!” (for which he received an Oscar nomination), and co-owns a record label and studio with the Smashing Pumpkins’ guitarist James Iha — Fountains of Wayne have established a fervent fan base around the world.
This following has accrued despite the band’s distinctly East Coast flavor. Only Grand Junction’s ex-New Yorkers are likely to get allusions to long-time New York news personalities Chuck Scarborough and Sue Simmons on Fountains of Wayne’s latest album, “Traffic and Weather,” but the tales of urban anomie and ennui told in songs like “Someone to Love” and “New Routine” will translate easily for anyone who ever “puts Coldplay on, pours a glass of wine, curls up with a book about organized crime” or thinks to him- or herself:
“I’m so, I’m so sick of this place
I’m so ready for a change of pace
I’m just looking for a new routine.”
