Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt. This is Rolling Stone Music Now, coming at you once again remotely.

I have with me today Alan Seppenwall, Rolling Stone's TV critic who's making a special appearance with us today and our friend Rob Sheffield.

We don't have a happy reason for today's episode. We're doing a tribute for Adam Schlesinger, who died suddenly and unexpectedly from complications of COVID-19 at age 52.

He was such a special musician, such a special songwriter, and people I think were just gutted to hear about this.

I think a lot of us had a stronger personal reaction

than we expected.

He did everything.

You know, he was, of course, a co-founder and songwriter of Fountains of Wayne but he also wrote a tremendous amount of other

music from that thing you do to some of the songs in the movie Music and Lyrics to some of the great songs in

Josie and the Pussycats.

And in the last few years from 2015 to 2019,

he co-wrote all the songs for the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,

just song after song and style after style.

And that's one of the many things I'm hoping Alan can help us talk about.

But what a unique career and personally some of the people I admire most among musicians are people who

basically went into an office every day and wrote songs, grill-building type people.

And those are to me sometimes even bigger heroes than the people up on the stage who get all the attention.

So Adam Slessner was an amazing example of that kind of person and I think quite worthy of this episode

I'm glad we can do this for him.

Rob, I'll start with you. this episode I'm glad we can do this for him.

Rob, I'll start with you.

How did your fandom for Adam begin?

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