Impressions of a “Real People” Life: An Interview with Chris Collingwood

There’s a windblown tangerine sunset spread out along the horizon over New Jersey. From the penthouse of the Standard Hotel in the heart of the East Village, everybody’s taking blurry, oversaturated pictures with their phones. We’re between sets: Sam Evian and company have taffy-pulled some psychedelic vibes, dismantled their instruments, and wandered off to admire the view. Look Park, the new project from erstwhile Fountains of Wayne frontman Chris Collingwood, is up next.

If you’ve never been to a show at The Standard you won’t have a good handle on the vibe there, but it’s weird: it’s about the view more than anything, you’ll get half your crowd shut outside on the balcony while the band plays its set. It’s beautiful, but there’s nothing to do, nothing to lean on and no place to sit down for long stretches at once. It’s enough to make a person wait in line for a $14 cocktail between sets, that and how high up it is. It’s a weird vibe.

When Look Park takes the stage it’s a stripped down lineup: just Collingwood, his guitar, and keyboardist Scott Klass (of The Davenports). It’s well over a month before Look Park’s debut album drops, so nobody knows any of the songs. It’s weird.

“Actually, one of the reasons I kinda had to be talked into doing that gig is I hate playing songs for people that they haven’t heard already. Especially really stripped down, when the record has all that lush instrumentation,” Collingwood says when I call him a week later to discuss Look Park and its various moving parts. It’s true: the album is full of layered keyboards and studio sounds, underpinned by spare, textural percussion. The Standard show was a one-off, not worth the cost of bringing a full band. The real debut for Look Park will be at the legendary Fuji Rock Festival this July. It seems like an odd place to make a debut — odder than The Standard, even. I point it out to Chris and he agrees:

“Well, they asked us, and uh, actually it’s weirder than it sounds, because the record doesn’t even come out … the record comes out the day before the Fuji Rock gig.” The record is actually already out in Japan, if Chris’s Twitter is any indication, which is a good sign. After that, an abbreviated Look Park lineup hits the road supporting Squeeze, which is a much more obvious choice.

“Fountains of Wayne toured with Squeeze many years ago and that was one of the funnest tours we ever did,” he tells us, “because a couple times we got to play with Squeeze, some of their songs onstage, and Glenn [Tilbrook] came up with us on some of our songs, and it was a really, really good time. So as far as Look Park, I just noticed they were touring because I saw it online somewhere and I asked my booking agent to ask and he said that he’d already asked and was waiting to hear back. It was actually all pretty quick. The only downside is that opening slots like that don’t pay anything, so it’s just about figuring out a way to make it work. It was less of an issue with Fountains of Wayne because, I don’t know why; at the time, maybe we had a lot of tour support.”

They’re taking a three-piece Look Park on the road with Squeeze — Chris, Scott Klass, and another guitarist — and enthusiastically so. Chris talks about it like it’s a big adventure, a 16-date West coast tour with three guys in a van. “I’ve actually never done a tour without a tour manager, so this tour … it’s just gonna be me, doing all the tour managing which I don’t have any idea what to do.” But he seems confident enough. “We’ll figure it out. The last tour manager we had, I swear to god, we’d just be driving around and he’d be doing that Priceline thing on his phone while we were like ten minutes out of the city, so he didn’t do a whole lot of preplanning. Maybe that’s a really economical way to do it, I don’t know!”

Needless to say, there’s plenty going on for Chris Collingwood right now.

All this, of course, is only the apex of a project several years in the making. The record, Look Park, came out of a slough of material written by Collingwood after Fountains of Wayne’s last tour promoting Sky Full of Holes. Collingwood estimates that he wrote maybe a hundred songs before narrowing down to the ten on the record.

“Did you know you weren’t going to use those songs for Fountains of Wayne?” I ask him. “Were they always intended for another project, or was it just, y’know, you’re a songwriter so you write songs, regardless of where they’re going to end up?”

“No, it was pretty clear I wasn’t gonna make a record with Fountains of Wayne,” he says. “It took a while to sort of figure out what I was going with, and some of the songs ended up sounding like Fountains of Wayne songs and I just kinda threw ’em out thinking, like, I didn’t want to do that. And, I mean, I wrote a lot of stuff and kinda just whittled it down. I ended up starting demoing stuff and some of the demos just seemed too hard to do, and then some of the demos just got fleshed out pretty quickly. I have a studio in my house and songs like ‘Stars of New York’, that was pretty much fully demoed out.”

Once he had the demos he had to actually put together the personnel to make the damn thing. Coming out of a band — and especially coming out of Fountains of Wayne, which had been together nearly two decades and produced all of their albums themselves — was a completely different experience. Early on, his manager at the time asked him who his dream producer would be, and he knew immediately: Mitchell Froom.

“He just kinda laughed at me, he was like, ‘There’s no way you could ever afford that guy.’ And Michael, who’s my manager now, I just had him on the phone and I said, ‘What are we gonna do?’ Then he was just a friend, and I said, ‘What are we gonna do to get these demos made into an album?’ I told him that my manager at the time said ‘Don’t even think about Mitchell Froom, there’s no way we can afford him,’ and Michael suggested that I find him and ask him myself, so I did.”

How did he get into contact with legendary producer Mitchell Froom?

“I actually went on LinkedIn, which I never use. I never use LinkedIn, but that’s where I found him, and I sent him a little note and I said ‘Can I send some demos?’ and he said ‘Yes’ and like a week and a half later, we got started on it. And once he was involved, I’d already had an offer to make a record for Yep Roc because they were Fountains of Wayne’s label, for our previous albums. So once Mitchell was involved, I asked my lawyer to kinda work it out so everybody was happy and, y’know, I don’t know all the details of how Mitchell is getting paid but it’s not. It’s barely anything, and it was very cool to do because he still was very into it and I was just as excited about it.”

You can hear that excitement on the album: it sounds fresh and perfectly ripe; it’s entirely appropriate for a midsummer release. “Part of [Froom’s] process is to get on the phone and just talk and get to know you, so there was about — before we actually met in person we had been talking for more than a month,” Collingwood says. “Almost every day, and sending demos back and forth and doing pre-production between my studio and his studio.” All that aside, when it came down to it the actual in-studio time was very efficient.

“By the time we actually got to record, which was in his studio in Santa Monica, all the arrangements were pretty much set, and then we played what we had for the studio musicians. And I think the studio musicians were only there for two days, total, so two days tracking bass and drums, and then the rest of the time was me doing guitars and Mitchell doing keyboards.” It helps that he had killer session guys: bassist Davey Faragher and drummer Michael Urbano are versatile, lending subtlety and grace to the rhythmic spine of the record.

The band on the way to Fuji Rock is working hard to fill such lofty shoes. “There’s also so many keyboards on the record,” he explains. “There’s some places where the drums just need to simplify live, and you know, pick up some pieces that are normally covered by other parts of the arrangement and it’s a challenge because, you know, the drummer just kind of went out and learned the record and, well, there’s places to fill in.”

Those are details, though. Stuff that’s being ironed out. It’s the beginning of a larger project, and Chris is both proud and a little defensive of the future he’s trying to build. He has been adamant about the public interpretation of Look Park: it’s not a “solo project” or a “side project,” it doesn’t need to position itself in opposition or adjacency to the music he’s made with Fountains of Wayne.

It’s not just about not relating to his existing musical legacy, though: he says, “It’s also getting away from the singer-songwriter label. Like I love a lot of singer-songwriters but sometimes, like, when you’re making a singer-songwriter record the goal is just to go in there and provide just enough instrumentation that the song is communicated, right? Probably you’re working with a good singer, and you want to make sure their voice is clear enough to hear the song, but you don’t go in and like, add layers and layers of Mellotron on a singer-songwriter record. So that was another thing that I didn’t want to do, make it a really plain.” Not that he doesn’t love singer-songwriters, more that, “There’s people who, like my friend Ron Sexsmith, who does that and who is way better at it than I am, so like. That niche is already filled.” He says that he’s proud it sounds like a band.

“So is the idea that Look Park will eventually be a band with more members than you?” I ask him.

He’s enthusiastic: “Yeah!” he says. “I mean, that’s the way Fountains of Wayne got started. Fountains of Wayne was me and Adam, and we made the first record by ourselves and with a guy called Danny Weinkauf who’s now in They Might Be Giants, but he was never in the band, he just came in and played bass. And then we built a band around that, and I don’t have any problem with that. I mean I just, I like the idea of having a band with maybe a few constant members for a while and, if somebody else has something to do so they can take off and I’ll get another drummer for this tour, and whoever wants to stick around …

“My friend Scott, who you saw at that Standard show, I have been playing with him since before Fountains of Wayne, so that’s probably … before you you were born? 1993 maybe.”

It’s not that there’s no merit to a band with the same guys. “I think the best bands are able to keep changing and do interesting things. Y’know, I’m not even such a big U2 fan. I was when I was a teenager, but you sort of have to admire the fact that they’re the same four guys and they’ve managed to keep it interesting and change it up every record. And other [groups] like, The Beatles, y’know, they evolved.”

It’s just that it gets complicated, when you’re serving four egos rather than one project. “Everybody has to be on board with the idea that you’re gonna grow and change and turn into something else, and sometimes what happens is there’s one guy who doesn’t want to do that. Or a couple guys who don’t want to do that, so the only thing you can do is go off and make your own record.”

Towards the end of the interview I allow myself one question in which I am personally invested: “So officially — am I allowed to say Fountains of Wayne is dead?”

“You can say that if it happens again … I don’t see a path toward it happening again, but I don’t know, I’m not gonna rule it out completely. But I sorta doubt it.” Which is waffly at best, but I pressed. “Y’know Mitchell and I talked quite a bit about it while I was in LA, his point was just. Bands aren’t meant to go on for that long. You either turn into a parody of yourself, or whatever chemistry you have together has spent itself, because you’ve exhausted every possibility of combining the four elements of the band.”

Back at that Standard show, with a full midsummer moon visible behind the band and a breeze whipping up over the city, Chris jokes, “Now we’re gonna play some classic rock,” before launching into “Troubled Times”, an old favorite off Utopia Parkway. And it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful song, it has always stuck somewhere under my ribs and stayed there. I am glad to have heard it.

They opened the show with “You Can Come Round If You Want To”, though, my favorite track off the new record. It’s catchy in a way that might not be out of place on a Fountains of Wayne album, but it does feel different. If the Fountains of Wayne chemistry is gone, Collingwood’s certainly hasn’t dissipated. It’s a new era: “These are my impressions of a ‘real people’ life / You can come round if you want to.”

I really, really do.