Fountains of Wayne — "Stacy's Mom"

Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood of Fountains of Wayne wrote "Stacy's Mom" for the band's third album, "Welcome Interstate Managers", and produced it with Mike Denneen; it went to radio on May 19, 2003, via S-Curve and Virgin. The premise came from life, sideways: a childhood friend of Schlesinger's had been attracted to Schlesinger's grandmother. The sound came from record collections — a deliberate Cars homage the band admitted "owes a debt" to "Just What I Needed", so convincing that Cars frontman Ric Ocasek assumed the opening riff was a sample. It wasn't; they played it in the studio and, as the band put it, just "got it right."

The single reached number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the highest the famously critic-beloved band ever charted in the US — went top ten in Ireland and top twenty in the UK, Australia, and Canada, was certified gold by the RIAA, and picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocals. The video sealed it: director Chris Applebaum cast model Rachel Hunter, who took the role because she was a fan of the band, as the impossibly glamorous title character. The band's first choice had been Paulina Porizkova — Ocasek's then-wife, which would have squared the Cars homage perfectly.

Fountains of Wayne never crossed over again, though the song's afterlife kept going — pop-punk band Bowling for Soup released a cover in 2011. Schlesinger died of complications from COVID-19 on April 1, 2020, at 52, and the obituaries all led with the same three minutes of perfect summer radio.