The Warm Thrill of Confusion I used to carry around a little blue transistor radio at my grandmother's house in Douglassville, Pa., holding it tight against my ear for "Brandy" by Looking Glass and "Go All the Way" by the Raspberries. I had no idea what either of those songs meant. I might have known there was a drink called brandy and I thought Eric Carmen was singing "go away." I was 5, and that's probably my earliest memory of being transfixed by music. In the way children understand these things, I guess I thought it was magic. No part of my brain could hear the different instruments as distinct from one another, nor did it cross my mind that someone sat down and decided to write about something. Looking back, it's clear I wasn't being moved by the words to these songs. Just the opposite: what I couldn't place or process only hinted at a world I hadn't seen, somewhere beyond rural Pennsylvania. You hear a lot about the great big world when you're a kid, but I imagine kids today don't feel quite as far away from it as I did. What I saw of it came from TV and magazines, and one time my Uncle Mick pulled out a green metal box full of shell casings and talked scary about Vietnam. It was not at all inconsistent with my worldview that pop songs didn't make sense, because very little made sense to me. I took it as a given that confusion was part of the experience, and the desired effect. Bewilderment served me well as a child, but eventually I realized that a great many songs were about things. I also realized that usually what a song was about had little bearing on whether I liked it. Who starts out thinking "I really like songs about cars" or "I like songs about space travel"? There probably are people like that, but I don't know any. "Don't Worry, Baby" is one of my favorite songs, and I liked it only a tiny bit less when I realized it was about drag racing. More general themes tend to resonate more universally, since everyone has felt lonely or been in love, yet talking about those things directly is boring. I found myself much more interested in the way things were said than what was being said - the way the right word seemed to have been custom-crafted just for that little chunk of melody, or how the saddest part of a chorus coincided impossibly with the perfect phrase. What's more, sometimes the most fitting word or phrase didn't need the rest of the song or any supporting context to work. It seemed the right language could define its own universe and it didn't have to make sense to have emotional punch. All it took was to buy into someone else's reality for a little while, just like watching a movie, but without all those images distracting you. I probably would have gone on experiencing music at this level until I died had I not made the mistake of trying to figure out what makes it tick. Arthur C. Clarke no doubt had something incredibly nerdy in mind when he said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," but what it implies for musicians is absolutely true. Behind every song's immediate impact is a finite number of cogs and gears, and whatever skill you're developing when you start to study the separate elements and patterns, it soon takes over. The visceral appreciation of sound and melody give way to involuntary analysis and you start hearing songs by registering the progression and using horrible words like "tonic" and "dominant seventh." By the time I was a college student I wasn't listening to music in the same way. I was insufferable. This crappy band you like is trying to con me with its two chords and three-note melody. No wonder my girlfriend broke up with me. Thankfully, right around that time a whole bunch of fantastic postpunk acts were emerging in Great Britain: Aztec Camera, Prefab Sprout, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Kate Bush, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, The House of Love, Everything but the Girl, The Smiths, Billy Bragg, Echo and the Bunnymen, and many more. I loved all these bands, but Aztec Camera (nom de plume of the Scottish child prodigy Roddy Frame) struck me in a way nothing had since the Beatles. It was idealistic, romantic and at times downright poetic. The words weren't just taking up space. Even heady abstractions ("Don't wipe your eyes over lies/Just let them shine their blue/On every whisper that welcomes/The inconceivable and the birth of the true") seemed to resonate with some strange authority. Maybe it's because I was a naïve college student. I don't know (I've tried to listen as the jaded and cynical semi-human I've since become, and I don't think it's possible). Were Scots just walking through foggy graveyards and reading Keats and drinking wine all day? It was beautiful, and I felt engaged with pop songs on a level I hadn't before. They could ponder uncertainties and paint pictures and hint at complex emotions without literalism or sappiness. I was also young and stupid enough to cover these songs with complete sincerity. My signature move was to stop while my fingers were finding the next chord and say, "hold on, this is the good part." At roughly the same time, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians released "Sleeping With Your Devil Mask," an irreverent and wordy number I loved immediately ("It's all compulsion, there's no choice/My mother's second name is Joyce/And once when she was very young/She saw a cellist being hung"). Like the nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll, these syllables struck me as instantly musical, practically begging to be sung. The words anchor the melody nicely but don't portray anything close to real life. I think this kind of whimsy commands attention by keeping the listener off balance. Other songwriters from that time were more direct. Many know Billy Bragg for his political anthems, but I think his ballads owe more to the character-based works of Raymond Carver or Robert Altman. In "Levi Stubbs" Tears," for example, he tells the story of a hapless woman seeking comfort in the music of the Four Tops ("With the money from her accident, she bought herself a mobile home/So at least she could get some enjoyment out of being alone"). In contrast to Frame and Hitchcock, it's simple language and the story is the song. I'm incredibly nostalgic for that era, which I still think was a rare and explosive time for pop songwriting. These writers and their peers came at a time when the only other things I still liked were the classic rock records I grew up with. Anyway, who can call the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Paul Simon or Pink Floyd an influence? That's like saying you like the alphabet. In the mid-"80s, I was just learning how to play songs by listening to them. The British postpunk writers stayed with me because I learned their songs just as I started trying to write my own. At various times, I've poorly imitated each of them. After college and before Fountains of Wayne started in 1995, I had been writing some bad attempts at "folk pop." I wanted to be Roddy Frame. Mostly it was a mushy blend of mid-tempo acoustic ballads about love and loss and sometimes nothing in particular. Some of these songs later ended up on FOW records ("Troubled Times," "Imperia," "Kid Gloves"), but if the others were forgotten, it's because there was nothing memorable about them. I was living in Boston, working in a bank and sometimes playing with Mike Viola, a fantastic writer we still tour with quite a bit. I quit my job and moved to Brooklyn in maybe 1993, after I woke up one day and realized I was working at a bank. Adam Schlesinger lived in Manhattan; he and I had played in bands off and on since meeting at Williams College in 1986. In New York, the two of us made some demos of the old songs, but somewhere in between I had bought a shiny new hollow-body Gretsch and we decided to try something louder. I don't really remember why. Maybe it was the upheaval, or the thrill of being somewhere new and exciting, or the nightly drunken escapades all over the city. I think the first four FOW songs, "Radiation Vibe," "Survival Car," "Joe Rey" and "Leave the Biker," were all written in the same afternoon. Then Adam started writing some of his own, and within about a week we had most of the first album done. I have mixed feelings about that batch of songs, although they were all very different from the soft-rock I was writing before. "Radiation Vibe" in particular seemed to hit on something new, something like casual indifference rudely interrupted by a big chorus. I liked the way the words sounded and the dumb little three-note riff that seemed to be just killing time until the big E chord. When I was working on it, I was more interested in getting it done and moving on than I was in fact-checking or maintaining any kind of consistency. Whether any of it worked, it was dumbly confident and confidently dumb and pretty accurately reflected a brief, drunken, chaotic state of mind. It felt like I had admitted to myself that words could be fun, and it was liberating to stop pretending I was any good at writing Scottish poetry. That first album had a couple of real collaborations on it, which Adam and I haven't done since. We wrote "You Curse at Girls" and "I've Got a Flair" very quickly by strumming chords and throwing lines out rapid-fire (as if you couldn't tell). Adam started "Sick Day," and I wrote the second verse, which takes his original idea to a darker place. I really thought that's what he was going for, and maybe that confusion made it something broader than it would have been. Early on, there wasn't much difference between the ways we approached writing, mostly because Adam's great skill is his ability to write for different projects. He had already put out a record with Ivy, which sounded very different from us, and would later work with Tinted Windows and write so many song and dance numbers for stage and screen that I've lost count. My songs were a starting point for him, and he was just as comfortable doing that as any other type of song. People would ask who wrote which songs, and most often those who thought they had figured out the difference were wrong. Those who knew about my Gram Parsons fetish assumed I wrote the country-ish ones, which was not always true. Actually, if there was a general tendency one way or the other, it was that my songs were more impressionistic and Adam's were more literal. He likes to find a title that implies a character or a story line, and then write the story. It's a good way to work, and when you're done you have a coherent piece - when people hear it there's no question what it's about. Most country songs are written this way, which is usually pretty obvious (one, by the Bellamy Brothers, is called "If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body, Would You Hold It Against Me"). Like Billy Bragg, Adam is also adept at describing scenes with simple language. "I-95," my favorite of his, pretty effectively puts the listener in a car on the highway at night, using just a few unremarkable words. By contrast, my songs would play on the sounds of words. Sometimes they would have a setting or a mood but no story, or a narrator with confusing motives. I had no qualms about changing gears quickly or losing the plot entirely. Some of my songs featured verses of different lengths or with different melodies. As with Robyn Hitchcock, at times it was more about the rhythm and bounce than making sense. The problem with noting that difference, though, is that a good many of my songs were literal to a fault ("Red Dragon Tattoo," "Leave the Biker," "A Dip in the Ocean") and Adam has had his share of abstract songs ("The Senator's Daughter," "Mexican Wine"). If I had a consistent way of working, it would probably become clear over time why my songs come out the way they do. Trouble is, I've never had what other writers call a "process." I tend to justify long periods of inactivity with the pigheaded idea that if something doesn't come naturally, it wasn't meant to be. When one of my songs is literal, it's because the story has been dangled in front of me like a cat toy and I can't stop myself from pouncing on it. But most of the time I've got notebooks with jumbles of words and a pocket recorder. I jot down anything that strikes me as interesting, record little pieces of the melody, and keep coming back to it for a while. If I'm not sick of it after a few weeks, I start throwing more words into it and playing with its structure. I will sometimes change the direction a song is going just because a certain word or phrase fits, even if it's inconsistent with the original idea. If there's a conflict, I almost always choose the best sounding word, even if it makes the overall idea less coherent. I probably wouldn't need to do this if I had a better vocabulary. Often I'll gussy up something real until it isn't. This is true of "Amity Gardens," a forgotten track from our second album. The name comes from a housing project I lived in when I was a baby. I don't remember living there; the images in the song come from photos my grandmother showed me many years later. There were two of them: one of a shiny Buick in a suburban driveway, and one of a man with a phone to his ear, my 2-year-old brother sitting in the background. That man was my biological father, whom I've never met. I had the chorus for a long time and I must have toyed with 20 different ideas for the verse. There was no story in either picture, really, unless the story was me staring at things I had already seen, hoping to jar something loose. I did the second verse first: It isn't very much, but for now it's home A room in the shadow of a funny looking man On the phone to the bank about a default loan I thank you very much Tata, we'll be in touch I imagined he was fighting off creditors and planning a getaway, which may or may not have been true. My grandparents had given me certain ideas about the man, which played in my head like a blurry crime re-enactment video. I guess the verse felt like its soundtrack. The chorus, "If you knew now what you knew then/You wouldn't want to go home," is a more general sentiment that I imagine someone somewhere might relate to. In the end, if it doesn't make a lick of sense to anyone but my immediate family, I'm O.K. with that. I like the drum part. To be honest, before being asked to do this blog I hadn't given much thought to why I would want to take a simple idea and make it hard to understand. But then I realized I have the same inclination elsewhere. There's beauty in simplicity and everyone loves a well-executed action movie, but I would rather watch "Lost Highway" or just about any other David Lynch movie than two hours of car chases. I don't pretend to understand David Lynch, but it's fun trying to assemble the different pieces into potential interpretations. During most movies I'm writing the next scene in my head as the current one is playing, or wondering how things got so bad that people will pay money to see cars get airborne. Similarly, I change the radio station if after the first chorus I think the rest of the song has written itself. By that time most songs have gotten to the point, usually something about being in the club, and there's only so many things that might happen there. Anyway, I've seen the video, or at least one exactly like it. Then I think what it would take to make me keep listening and it's always the same thing: something surprising, something I couldn't have guessed, a break from the steady stream of predictable ideas hammered home by a lifetime of songs, movies and books. And the resulting cheap thrill in imagining that someone else's wordplay reveals a crazy lifestyle he or she inhabits even when you're not listening. And it's not that different from the way I enjoyed music when I was a child, when it was visceral and incomprehensible, a glimpse into a completely unknown world. I've been working on a whole bunch of new songs over the past year. Some are short and coherent and others are long, rambling and seemingly pointless, just like what you're reading now. I spend a lot of time reading political books and I've been sober for seven years. Besides making me not much fun to be around, my mind-set is different now and I'm sure that's evident in my writing. More than anything, I'm just not as impressed with myself as I used to be. On the other hand, I'm more careful now. Had I known in 1995 that we would be playing "Leave the Biker" in 2013, I probably would have spent more time on it, maybe told it in flashbacks from a hospital bed or a spaceship. Two-time Grammy loser Chris Collingwood is a singer, songwriter and cofounder of the rock group Fountains of Wayne. Since 1996, his career has included occasional chart success, extensive touring throughout America, Europe and Japan, and a brief appearance in a hit video with a pole-dancing supermodel. His twitter feed is @chemicalpill.