Given the make-up of the audience, I was a little surprised at how many of the songs were taken off the older albums (not that this was a Bad Thing-- Utopia Parkway is an excellent record). They opened with "I've Got a Flair" off their first album, followed by "It Must Be Summer," which is a pretty good combination, but confused about half the audience. The first new track they played was "Hackensack," which hasn't been released as a single (as far as I know), but seemed to have some people singing along. Or maybe that was just the crappy acoustics-- tough to say for sure. They didn't skip any of the important tracks off the latest album (I would've liked to hear "Little Red Light" more than "Bought for a Song," but they hit all the key tracks), but they filled the set out with a few odd choices from earlier records ("Go, Hippie" being the oddest. That's probably my least favorite track from Utopia Parkway).

I was a little disappointed that they didn't really do any cover songs-- given the sort of band they are, that's really the area where you would expect something different in a live show. They did work a bunch of stuff into the middle of "Radiation Vibe," though-- a sort of first-verse medly of the Steve Miller Band's "Jet Airlier," Foreigner's "Double Vision," and the Cars' "Let's Go," along with instrumental nods to the Eagles and Boston (and I may have missed one). Of course, they didn't sing any of the choruses, so as Collingwood noted, there were "a lot of confused young people" in the audience.

As I said, a good show. Not a blow-you-away, revelatory-experience sort of evening, but a solid performance. And with any luck, it'll get some of the kids who came to hear "Stacy's Mom" to pick up Utopia Parkway, which remains one of the most unjustly overlooked pop records this side of 1965.

Full disclosure note: the two main guys in Fountains of Wayne (Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger) both went to Williams. They graduated in '86 (I believe), so they were a bit before my time, but the alumni connection does sort of require me to have a strong opinion about them....