Fountains of Wayne first hooked me with their masterpiece concept album, Utopia Parkway, an ode to the also-ran early adults who smoked pot in the back of vans, went to coffee-house shows at Barnes & Noble, listened to Korn. The album captures the lives of those who never quite grew up—just self-aware enough to recognize their own stagnation but cushioned by privilege to avoid real consequences. They drift but never crash.
That sense of middle-ground nostalgia should have translated into breakout sales, but somehow it didn’t. Utopia Parkway had all the ingredients: sharp storytelling, airtight hooks. It was clever without being smug, accessible without pandering. And yet, it scattered into fan-boy appreciation rather than mainstream success—perhaps too middle-class to feel urgent, too polished to be rebellious.
The one official video from the album was the sublime “Denise,” a song that never charted outside of the alt list but, in retrospect, prefigured their only real hit, “Stacy’s Mom.” The difference between the two was mostly novelty marketing. “Stacy’s Mom” had a built-in high-concept premise: a teenage boy infatuated with his friend’s mom. “Denise,” by contrast, plays it straight—an impossible longing for an unattainable love object (and her lavender Lexus), a theme that runs through much of FOW’s best work. Both songs hinge on that same core emotional hook, but “Stacy’s Mom” had a music video that played up the comedy in a way that made it easy to package for early-2000s MTV.
And yet, Denise might be the more interesting of the two. The video, at first glance, leans into familiar rock tropes—a foxy love interest, an adoring band, stylized excess. The fact that FOW have two videos where a woman is getting the Flashdance shower treatment makes you wonder if they are fracking the male gaze, and are indeed nice-guy frat rock. But “Denise” quickly subverts this supposition. It’s not that the video muse Denise is too unbelievably hot for the band (though, in reality, she is), and can only be ‘had’ in the form of a teenage boy fantasy of her getting drenched—it’s that she only has eyes for her car, her “lavender Lexus.”
There are shades, lavender shades, of J.G. Ballard’s novel, Crash, in which characters are romantically attracted to car crashes. Denise’s love affair with her Lexus isn’t just a visual gag—it taps into something deeper, a pop-friendly nod to the auto-erotic obsession found in Crash. In “Denise,” the romance is streamlined and sanitized, but the DNA of that fetish remains. It also feels like a sly nod to The Cars, the band Fountains of Wayne most resembles, and who might have been the blueprint for the career they should have had.
But they didn’t have that career. Fountains of Wayne will forever be, to my mind, the most deserving/least appreciated band of my generation. Their songs, one after the other, are gems of ear toffee, falling just short of anthems and perfect for so many film and TV soundtracks they somehow never landed. They were tailor-made for the angst of suburban summers, for the peculiar youthful restlessness of places like Montclair, Scarsdale, and Winnetka.
Maybe they were just too Upper Middle Class, the survival instinct buried under Enteman’s cookie packaging and Nintendo games. This was before Vampire Weekend made liberal arts slumming cool—or their version of cool. Also, there’s nothing cool about Vampire Weekend.
Ultimately, FOW were smarter than they were dangerous, and you might put their lack of success down to their lack of charisma. They looked like what they were: a pair of nice guys from Williams College who could have just as easily been humanities professors, copyright lawyers, or publishing executives as rock stars. It’s a tough act to pull off. Hence, the mythologizing, sexualized videos that are highly referential to ‘cooler’ art and artists.
All this sounds like I don’t like FOW, but when all is said and done, I identify with them more than any pop artists outside of other New England liberal arts college grads like Elliott Smith. Their world—their sound, their sensibility—is one I know all too well. Maybe that’s why it never quite hit. It wasn’t a fantasy. It was just… familiar.
More on suburban woe in my memoir, Strange as Angels, here, live on PDF.
Or, sample this semi “Denise” inspired Playlist.
Matt Henderson Ellis 