Adam Schlesinger

• The End of the Movie [Carl Wilson Spotify playlist, 2020] A-

Consumer Guide Reviews:

The End of the Movie [Carl Wilson Spotify playlist, 2020]
While proving that Schlesinger was much more than Fountains of Wayne, this also suggests that he was at his most complex and humane when writing with and for Chris Collingwood, whose tender and sometimes even caring voice softens FOW's fondly sarcastic satires of post-yuppie financialization victims after the S&L scam sank what was left of their boat. Nonetheless, Wilson's overview is such a conceptual knockout that it's more than fine that 15 of these 23 unfailingly catchy and well-turned tracks are non-FOW. All contextualize and all belong, including six of the comedy songs Schlesinger churned out for the long-running sitcom Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: try "Gettin' Bi" ("I'm a bi kind of guy there's no reason to be shy"), "Let's Generalize About Men" ("There are no exceptions all three billion men are like this"), or the nonstop "First Penis I Saw" (from "It really made me drop my jaw" to "I was so eager I couldn't hide my keenness/Everything about it seemed quite ingenious/I couldn't find a single flaw"). Meanwhile, the FOW opener "All Kinds of Time" hurts like you never dreamed it would, and on a title closer from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend that Schlesinger sings himself, the big picture comes all too clear: "If you saw a movie that was like real life/You'd be like 'What the hell was that movie about?/It was really all over the place.'/Life doesn't make narrative sense/[brief pause] Nuh-uh." A-