Fountains of Wayne frontman Chris Collingwood shares Look Park song

Chris Collingwood has helmed the mic of power-pop outfit Fountains of Wayne for two decades, but when he finally releases his solo debut Look Park this summer, fans shouldn’t expect to hear much resemblance to his New York City quartet — or their 2003 smash hit “Stacy’s Mom.” EW is excited to preview that new sound by sharing his shambolic protest tune “Shout Part 1” below.

“It was important for me to make it sound not like a Fountains of Wayne record,” Collingwood, 48, tells EW of working under the Look Park moniker. And as for the moniker at all, he says it’s because he wanted to avoid having it appear as a side-project, or a way to kill time between FOW albums. “I wanted people to pay attention,” he says. And, “I always like band names more than people using their names. It sounds cooler [laughs].”

To move further into this new sonic territory, he sought help from Grammy-nominated producer Mitchell Froom (Elvis Costello, Los Lobos). The Fountains of Wayne process is that whoever in the band wrote a song produces that song during studio sessions, but now everything fell under Froom’s watchful eye. And while that new process took acclimating, Collingwood admits, in the end, “It was the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.”

That might sound surprising given that Collingwood was behind one of the biggest songs of the early Aughts, the anthem for peeping Toms everywhere, “Stacy’s Mom.” But Collingwood is ambivalent when discussing the tune. “I consider that song a fluke,” he says. “[Bassist] Adam [Schlesinger] and I have different goals sometimes. A song like that is a double-edged sword: It gives you a ton of exposure, but then people know you as the band with the novelty hit.”

For “Shout Part 1,” which he began writing five years ago after reading George Packer’s The Unwinding, he had an even bigger goal: “I was trying to write a national anthem,” he says.

“Shout Part 1” is streaming below. Look Park is currently available for pre-order. So far, Collingwood has also shared “Aeroplane” off the album.