RIFFS: Pop music unplugged

Fountains of Wayne took root in the mid-1990s when songwriters Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood began funneling the sounds of British pop into wry narratives about dead-end jobs and humdrum suburbia.

Although heavily influenced by the Hollies and the Beatles, the band paired its love for melody with a tongue-in-cheek mentality, simultaneously celebrating timeless pop music while steering clear of pastiche territory. Thus, songs about love were turned into sugary odes to a friend’s attractive parent (“Stacy’s Mom”) while others dryly celebrated the lure of consumer culture (“The Valley of Malls”) and high school football (“All Kinds of Time”).

Following the release of “Traffic and Weather” in 2007, Fountains of Wayne’s four members took a sabbatical to focus on separate projects. Guitarist Jody Porter, who joined the group during its first national tour, issued a solo album, and drummer Brian Young lent his percussion skills to various artists. Meanwhile, bassist Adam Schlesinger composed music for a Broadway musical, “Crybaby,” and subsequently busied himself with his own recording studio, where he produced material for bands including Dashboard Confessional and America.

“All of us keep busy outside of the band to different degrees,” Mr. Schlesinger says from New York City, where he lives with his family. “I’m keeping myself occupied — doing some writing, doing some production and just enjoying being home.”

Mr. Schlesinger’s current stay in the Big Apple will be short-lived, however. Fountains of Wayne recently completed an acoustic tour of the West Coast, and an eastern run is just around the corner.

“We’ve been playing fairly small rooms,” Mr. Schlesinger says of the recent shows, which took the band from Washington state to Southern California last month. “It’s been a lot of venues that we don’t normally see, and we had to rethink a bunch of songs to make them work in an acoustic format. It’s been fun for us to do something different.”

The acoustic shows also have enabled Fountains of Wayne to road-test several new songs, which the band hopes to include on a new album. Recording sessions took place in late 2008 and will resume after the tour, with the intention of issuing the completed record before year’s end. Audience reception to those new tunes, Mr. Schlesinger says, has been favorable.

“We’ve been playing four or five new ones a night, just to test them out. Most of our songs are originally on the acoustic guitar, so it’s not a stretch to adapt them to these shows.”

New selections include a driving, minor-key pop nugget titled “The Summer Place” and the midtempo “Cold Comfort Flowers,” which features lush vocal harmonies and piano arpeggios.

Could another “Stacy’s Mom,” the surprise hit single that revived the band’s sales in 2003, be in the mix?

Mr. Schlesinger doesn’t seem overly concerned — and given the band’s recent string of sold-out performances, neither do his fans.

Although Fountains of Wayne generally plays the 9:30 Club while passing through the District, the band will resume its acoustic tour Thursday evening at the Birchmere (3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria). Mike Viola, with whom Mr. Schlesinger co-wrote the Grammy-winning song “That Thing You Do” in 1996, will open the show. Tickets are sold out; doors open at 7:30 p.m.

— Andrew Leahey

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