Song of the Day 2/9: Fountains of Wayne, “Amity Gardens”

There are lots of songs about real places, but I don’t know of any song that celebrates a real place more obscure than Amity Gardens, Pa. That’s what you’d expect from the wry sense of humor that typified Fountains of Wayne, this century’s most accomplished power pop band.

Composer Chris Collingwood, who founded the band with the late Adam Schlesinger, grew up in Bucks County, but Amity Gardens is closer to Delaware — an anodyne exurban community between Pottstown and Reading along the Schuykill River. The “amity” in the name indicates its Quaker origins.

The mood of the song always struck me as rather melancholy, which might be explained by the poignant story behind it. Collingwood wrote about it on the interwebs some years back.

Often I’ll gussy up something real until it isn’t. This is true of “Amity Gardens,” a forgotten track from our second album. The name comes from a housing project I lived in when I was a baby. I don’t remember living there; the images in the song come from photos my grandmother showed me many years later.

There were two of them: one of a shiny Buick in a suburban driveway, and one of a man with a phone to his ear, my 2-year-old brother sitting in the background. That man was my biological father, whom I’ve never met.

I had the chorus for a long time and I must have toyed with 20 different ideas for the verse. There was no story in either picture, really, unless the story was me staring at things I had already seen, hoping to jar something loose. I did the second verse first:

It isn’t very much, but for now it’s home
A room in the shadow of a funny looking man
On the phone to the bank about a default loan
I thank you very much
Tata, we’ll be in touch

I imagined he was fighting off creditors and planning a getaway, which may or may not have been true. My grandparents had given me certain ideas about the man, which played in my head like a blurry crime re-enactment video. I guess the verse felt like its soundtrack.

The chorus, “If you knew now what you knew then/You wouldn’t want to go home,” is a more general sentiment that I imagine someone somewhere might relate to. In the end, if it doesn’t make a lick of sense to anyone but my immediate family, I’m O.K. with that. I like the drum part.