Under the Cover with Fountains of Wayne

Following their most successful album to date, 2003’s Welcome Interstate Managers, Fountains of Wayne are cleaning out their closet. Their latest, Out-of-State Plates, is a two-CD collection of B-sides and rarities featuring six covers from artists including Jackson Browne, Ricky Nelson, ELO and Britney Spears.

We asked the power-pop band’s founders, bassist Adam Schlesinger and singer Chris Collingwood, to name the top five things that make a great cover.

1) Choose a good song, and don’t worry about who sings it. “I’m not a Britney Spears fan, but we covered ‘… Baby One More Time’ because we thought it was a great song,” Schlesinger says. “Just because she happened to record it first doesn’t change that.” Adds Collingwood: “If it’s a good song, it doesn’t matter if it was originally sung by a tone-deaf monkey.”

2) Give the song your own twist, but not too much of a twist. “If you’re just imitating the original, your version has no reason to exist,” says Schlesinger. “But sometimes, you can go too far. We once did a dark, distorted Jesus and Mary Chain-type version of Steely Dan’s ‘Do It Again’ that got us nothing but a lot of blank stares.”

3) Don’t worry about being ironic. “It seems like whenever we do a serious cover, people think it’s a joke, and vice versa,” Collingwood says. “Sometimes even we can’t tell the difference. At soundchecks, some of the band members like to play Rush songs. For me, that’s ironic, but they’re not kidding. To them, maybe it’s ironic when I sing a Jackson Browne song, but I think he’s an amazing songwriter.”

4) Pick something you can sing. “Chris can sing a lot of different kinds of songs, so we can cover a lot of styles,” says Schlesinger. “But even he has limits. We won’t be covering Antonio Carlos Jobim and singing in Portuguese anytime soon.”

5) Don’t cover a Beatles song. “In general, it’s a bad idea,” Schlesinger says. “The world definitely doesn’t need any more Beatles covers.”