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Emmy-winning musician Adam Schlesinger dies from coronavirus

FILE - This Sept. 14, 2019 file photo shows Adam Schlesinger, winner of the awards for outstanding original music and lyrics for "Crazy Ex Girlfriend," in the press room at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards in Los Angeles. Schlesinger, an Emmy and Grammy winning musician and songwriter known for his band Fountains of Wayne and his songwriting on the TV show “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” has died from coronavirus at age 51. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)

Emmy
and Grammy-winning musician and songwriter Adam Schlesinger, known for
his work with his band Fountains of Wayne and on the TV show “Crazy
Ex-Girlfriend,” died Wednesday after contracting the coronavirus.

Schlesinger
died at a hospital in upstate New York, his longtime lawyer Josh Grier
told The Associated Press. It is not clear where or how Schlesinger, a
51-year-old father of two daugthers, contracted the virus. He had been
sedated and on a ventilator for several days.

Schlesinger was nominated for 10 Emmys for writing comical songs across several television shows, winning three.

He
was also nominated for an Academy Award for writing the title song for
the 1997 movie “That Thing You Do,” written and directed by Tom Hanks.
The snappy pop ditty was the fictional one hit for a Beatles-esque band
called the One-ders, later changed to the Wonders, on a label called
Playtone, a name Hanks adopted for his production company.

“There
would be no Playtone without Adam Schlesinger, without his ‘That Thing
You Do!’” Hanks, who is himself recovering from the coronavirus, said on
Twitter. “He was a One-der. Lost him to Covid-19. Terribly sad today.”

Raised
in New York and Montclair, New Jersey, Schlesinger formed Fountains of
Wayne, named for a lawn ornament store in Wayne, New Jersey, in 1995
with his classmate from Williams College in Massachusetts, Chris
Collingwood.

With Schlesinger playing bass and singing backup and
Collingwood playing guitar and singing lead, and the two men co-writing
songs, the band known for its sunny harmonies and synthesis of pop,
rock punk and comedy would have hits in 1996 with “Radiation Vibe” and
2003 with “Stacy’s Mom.” The latter was nominated for a Grammy.

The
band was more New Jersey than New York. While most rock bands live for
the city, Fountains of Wayne and Schlesinger’s writing embraced the
suburbs with finely-etched tales of lives like a floor installer who’s
convinced his crush will come back looking for him and a commuter who’s
sure about his “Bright Future in Sales.”

“That’s a real Randy
Newman thing,” Schlesinger told the AP in 2003. “That’s a trademark of
his writing that I was always amazed by — the sort of unaware narrator,
where you learn more about him than he does himself inside of a few
verses.”

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said on Twitter that Schlesinger’s death is a “sad, sad loss for Jersey’s music scene.”

Stephen King, Fran Drescher and many others were also singing his praises on social media.

After
Fountains of Wayne’s main run was done, Schlesinger would then drop
behind the scenes and go on to be known for his writing.

He won
the 2009 Grammy for best comedy album for co-writing the songs on “A
Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!” a companion to a TV
Christmas special with songs performed by Stephen Colbert and Elvis
Costello.

In recent years he was known along with the show’s star
Rachel Bloom as one of the songwriters behind “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” the
musical comedy series on the CW.

Last year, Schlesinger, Bloom and Jack Dolgen won an Emmy for the show’s song, “Antidepressants Are So Not A Big Deal.”

Bloom was in the hospital having a baby girl
while Schlesinger was another hospital across the country with the
virus. She said in an Instagram post Wednesday that she, her husband and
her baby had returned home safely but it had been the most “emotionally
intense” week of her life to be having her daughter while her “dear
friend” was suffering 3,000 miles away.

Working again with David
Javerbaum, Schlesinger won a 2012 Emmy Award for writing the song “It’s
Not Just for Gays Anymore,” performed by Neil Patrick Harris to open the
Tony Awards telecast. They wrote another song for Harris that won them
another Emmy the following year.