Fountains Of Wayne Untangle 'Traffic' Jams

Fountains Of Wayne will break a nearly four-year span between studio
albums with the April 3 release of the Virgin project “Traffic and
Weather.” First single “Someone To Love” will arrive in late February
at U.S. radio outlets.
“It’s a little bit ‘Elanor Rigby’-esque, in that it’s about
these two lonely people living in New York,” group member Adam
Schlesinger tells Billboard.com of the single. “It has a disco-y beat,
which is something we don’t do a lot of. Melissa Auf Der Maur sings
backing vocals, and that’s the first female vocal we’ve had since
Dominique Durand from Ivy on the first album.”
“Traffic and Weather” will also feature “92 Subaru” (“It kind
of sounds like the Doobie Brothers or Little Feat or something,”
Schlesinger laughs), “Yolanda Hayes” (“about a woman who works at the
DMV”) and the country-tinged “Fire in the Canyon,” which sports backing
vocals from the Candy Butchers’ Mike Viola.
Initially, the band planned to split recording between
Bearsville Studios near Woodstock, N.Y., and Stratosphere Studios in
Manhattan, the latter of which is co-owned by Schlesinger, former
Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha and Ivy’s Andy Chase.
“We had these grand ambitions to change our process,”
Schlesinger says. “We went up to Woodstock and jammed, but in the end,
only one thing from that session, ‘Strapped for Cash,’ turned into an
actual song. For the rest of it, we went back to our usual method of
writing on our own and bringing in a song to be arranged by everyone.
Woodstock was good to get back together and loosen up, but I guess
we’re pretty set in our ways.” A tour in support of “Traffic and
Weather” is still pending, but the group will perform at the Coachella
and Bonnaroo festivals, to be held in late April and mid-June,
respectively. Schlesinger expects the band to active between those two
events and then again later in the summer.