VOX: I'm sorry to hear about your studio (burning down). Was it Room with a Jew?
A.S.: It was a drag. No, it wasn't Room with a Jew. That's my personal studio at home. It was Stratosphere Sound, which used to be called The Place. We have been working on the new Ivy record, so it'll set that back a bit, but we'll have to rebuild.

VOX: So, you live in Hoboken?
A.S.: No, I live in New York City - Greenwich Village. Pretty much the entire city was at a standstill for a day, but everything is fine.

VOX: How long until you head back out on the road again?
A.S.: We leave Tuesday [September 21^st] to Australia, then to Japan. I'm not sure if we'll do any more U.S. dates. Maybe if we can get a good spot opening on a big tour, but I don't think we'll do any more club shows. It all depends on how the next single does, but we have been on the road since early this year.

VOX: What's the next single going to be?
A.S.: "Troubled Times."

VOX: Do you enjoy touring?
A.S.: I enjoy playing every night. Touring wears you down, but I love playing. There are worse things to do than tour that's for sure. One thing, we're much better at organizing than in the past. Early on, you just set it up and go. Now we're really good at getting it all organized. This little break has been good, because we've been working on the new Ivy record. We're a bit past half-way finished. I think we'll have it out early next year, in the spring.

VOX: What do you think of Los Angeles?
A.S.: I always have a good time when I'm there. Of course, I've never lived there. It's fun being there for a week and driving around in a rental car. It does always seem like, when I've been there, that I'm just on the outskirts of the city, but I think that's because it's so sprawling. I guess that's because there really isn't a real city center, like Manhattan has. I just drive around, and it never ends. I keep expecting to get to the 'city' part of it, but it never happens. It's so different from any other place. It is a lot like New Jersey, in some ways, but so much bigger.

VOX: Any favorite places that you like to go and play?
A.S.: The big cities - New York, LA, London, Chicago…San Francisco has always been great. As for Europe, it's always fun to play in a city where we have fans. Paris is cool, but Germany is another story. We've been there like eight times, and each time we wonder why we're there. We're not big in Germany.

VOX: How did Fountains of Wayne come together?
A.S.: Chris and I met in college, at Williams College in Massachusetts, and we've been in a number of bands ever since. Basically, it's been the evolution of Fountains of Wayne - lots of different iterations with different names, until eventually we ended up with a consistent lineup.

VOX: You have had a change at guitar recently.
A.S.: Yeah, Jody [Porter] left. He's a great guitar player. We have a guy named Phil Hurley who is going to go out on tour with us now. I'm not sure if he'll end up as the permanent guitar player, but he's the type of guy who can kind of step in and play anything. He was with the Gigolo Ants before, and he's really good.

We always knew - there was this understanding - that Jody really wanted to do his own thing and write his own stuff. We're still friends and all that, but he felt it was time to concentrate on his music. And we understood that. It wasn't creative differences or anything like that. He needs to play his own music and he couldn't do that with Fountains of Wayne.

VOX: What sort of changes did you see take place in the band between the first album and Utopia Parkway?
A.S.: We were not a band before. It was more like me and Chris [Colingwood] in a studio dicking around. We had a friend play bass, and he didn't even end up being in the band. For the second album, we had a permanent band, we took more time writing and recording. I'm not sure if it's good or bad, but we did more planning. It was much more a planned thing.

VOX: How did the album title come about?
A.S.: Well, I wrote the song first, and it just sort of tied the album together. It's a real place in Queens - an actual street - and it helped to give the record a theme of some sort. There are lots of references to real places on the record.

VOX: There seems to be a theme of teen angst running through the record.
A.S.: A little bit. I think that's because we like to write songs with a traditional pop theme, and many of those themes sort of fit the 'teen angst' idea.

VOX: What is the songwriting process like for you and Chris?
A.S.: These days we don't collaborate at all. We write separately, then each come in with a bunch of songs and play them for each other and see which ones we like. We'll play them on guitar or piano and see what we can do with them. Then we build on them from there.

VOX: There is the Metallica reference in "Laser Show." Are you a Metallica fan?
A.S.: It's an in-joke. We have the same managers that Metallica does. And they are the type of band that you can imagine them doing a laser show for.

VOX: "Red Dragon Tattoo" is in some ways painful, because you can hear the effort to impress this woman. What was the influence behind that one?
A.S.: Actually, Chris wrote that. I think he really liked the title, and wrote around that. He will start with a title that suggests a story and then write that story. It's a different way of writing.

VOX: Who do you consider your musical influences?
A.S.: Hmmm…there are too many to mention. I guess it's more songwriters that bands. Randy Newman, The Beatles…British music. I think we write songs that sound like something from our childhood, to a good degree.

VOX: What made you decide to be a bass player?
A.S.: I'm the bass player by default. I'm really a piano player, but I can play guitar and drums. But I started on piano as a little kid. At around 14 or 15 I realized that being a keyboard player sucked because you have to stand in the back and you can't run around the stage. I wanted to move around. And it always seemed like the bass player was the hardest part of the band to find, so I ended up doing that. But it's by default.

VOX: With the success of Fountains of Wayne, will you still have time for Ivy?
A.S.: Definitely! We'll get the record finished and out by early next year. The studio burning down was a set back, but we'll have it finished by early spring. I'm not sure what the tour plan will be - how we'll get a band together or what - but I'm sure we'll work that out then.

VOX: Any prospective titles for the album yet?
A.S.: No, nothing yet. That'll come later.

VOX: How did you feel when you found out you had been nominated for an Academy Award [Best Song for the title track to the Tom Hanks movie "That Thing You Do"]?
A.S.: It was surreal from beginning to end. It started with this silly little song I wrote and then it just took on a life of it's own. I'm definitely not ashamed of it, but it was a strange experience. Very surreal. I do think it detracted from what we were trying to do as Fountains of Wayne, a little bit. I think Chris wished it would just sort of go away so we could focus on what we were doing.