"Valley Winter Song" comes from the 2003 album Welcome Interstate Managers, best known as the home of a song that was immensely popular at the time but didn't age all that well: "Stacy's Mom."
Which is a shame, because it's a phenomenal power pop song. Just enough guitar, great dynamic contrast and vocal range, including one of the great key changes of the early 21st century--it's textbook.
That's because Fountains of Wayne's bassist is Adam Schlesinger, who is the songwriter Rivers Cuomo's spent 20 years angstily trying to become. Schlesinger is a machine, who, in addition to his work with Fountains of Wayne, is one of America's great pop rock songwriters, which is to say that he's the guy who wrote "That Thing You Do."
Here's a fun fact: "That Thing You Do" did not win the Academy Award for best original song in 1996, despite being by any reasonable standard the best original song--certainly the best in-universe musical hit or best rock or pop song--for any film in the history of mankind. And that's fine, because, like, "Miss Misery" lost to "My Heart Will Go On" the very next year--sometimes great songs lose to good songs that go big. Except "That Thing You Do" lost "You Must Love Me" by Madonna, from Evita, which inspires one emotion, and one emotion only: regret. Regret that I have but these primitive human words to describe what a colossal miscarriage of justice that is.
Madonna's a legendary figure in pop music, but "You Must Love Me" is such pandering old person garbage it leaves you with creaky knees and the taste of Metamucil in the back of your throat. It is a horrid song, written for the express purpose of getting Madonna some Oscar juice, and to humanity's eternal shame, it worked.
I hesitate to call it Costco-brand Celine Dion, because I adore Celine Dion, who is a goddess, and does not deserve the indignity of being compared to this piece of paint-by-numbers mailed-in crap by the lyricist from The Road to El Dorado and the composer of the stage adaptation of School of Rock, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron von Shrill, Overwrought High School Drama Club Adaptation.
Everyone involved in making "You Must Love Me" has made great music. This is not great music. This is bad music.
"You Must Love Me" beating "That Thing You Do" is worse than Shakespeare in Love beating Saving Private Ryan or Forrest Gump beating The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction. It is the Academy's version of Nate Robinson beating Andre Iguodala in the dunk contest.
Being the worst award snub of Adam Schlesinger's career is saying something, because Welcome Interstate Managers got Fountains of Wayne two Grammy nominations: one for best new artist, which Evanescence of all things won, and I'm not mad about because Fountains of Wayne had had charted "Radiation Vibe" seven years earlier and shouldn't even have been nominated, and even so, 50 Cent was probably more deserving anyway.
The second one, for best pop duo or group performance, went to No Doubt for "Underneath it All," which...I guess we needed to reward Gwen Stefani's 11th-best hit single?
What I'm saying is that as a just world, Adam Schlesinger would be three-quarters of the way to an EGOT.
Anyway.
"Valley Winter Song" is the kind of song that's meant to be sung around a fireplace, which is partially about how it sounds, but also that it's about being buttoned up in a cabin in a snowstorm. It has dense harmonies and fast-moving guitar solos, but it's orchestrated in such a way that you can almost see the mechanism working, like one of those toy car engines with a transparent cover. It's complex and comforting at the same time, because one of the guys who wrote it knows how to write power pop with the expertise of a scientist.
