By Andrew Dalton, AP Entertainment Writer
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.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More