Fountains of Wayne Set First Gig Since Adam Schlesinger’s Death

Five years after the Covid-related death of Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, the band’s surviving members will reunite for their first public performance in a dozen years.

Milwaukee’s Summerfest announced its lineup Wednesday, and deep on the bill was Fountains of Wayne; the band’s founding members — singer Chris Collingwood, guitarist Jody Porter, and drummer Brian Young — confirmed the gig on their newly launched Bluesky account, adding that Eve 6’s Max Collins would fill in for Schlesinger on bass.

The Summerfest show on the July 4th weekend is the reunited Fountains of Wayne’s lone tour date so far.

Schlesinger died in April 2020 at the age of 52 due to complications from Covid-19. Soon after, amid the coronavirus quarantine, his bandmates reunited — with help from Sharon Van Etten — for the first time in seven years to virtually perform on a New Jersey pandemic relief fund’s benefit livestream. A half-decade later, Fountains of Wayne will reunite onstage for their first official concert since 2013.

Following Schlesinger’s death, his longtime friend and bandmate Collingwood paid tribute to him in a Rolling Stone interview. “Adam’s greatest skill was distilling a genre to its essence and recreating it flawlessly, something he understood about himself and said all the time,” Collingwood said. 

“That kind of ability comes from being fluent in the language of pop music, from years of listening analytically and being able to play many different instruments. It wasn’t until after FOW that I realized some of my guitarist friends have no idea what their drummer or bass player is doing at any given moment. Adam could have played every instrument on every FOW song, and it seemed to me he carried around in his head some idealized version of each of his songs that nothing real could measure up to.”