February 19, 2009

Only seconds after going through the comments of last night's very hopping Cheap Trick thread, I head over to Pitchfork and what do I see?

According to Billboard.com, there's a new band that exists on earth called Tinted Windows featuring former Smashing Pumpkin James Iha, Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos, handsome Hanson brother Taylor, and Fountains of Wayne bassist Adam Schlesinger.

I am looking at my calendar right now. It is not April 1.

This barely, almost makes sense. Iha and Schlesinger (who's a master tunesmith, more on this in a second) own a studio together. The Smashing Pumpkins and Cheap Trick are the two most important bands to ever come out of Illinois and it stands to reason that at some point they've met and shared an acknowledgment of that fact, and probably felt very smug about it. Hanson, after their original bubblegum emergence, became a very critically respected cult act (really!) by making a string of albums that at their best sound like a combination of the Jackson 5 and... Cheap Trick. Yeah, let's start a band.

Meanwhile, there's no one better to write songs in this band than Schlesinger, a master tunesmith who wrote "That Thing You Do" for the movie of the same name, "Pretend to Be Nice", the only great song on the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack, and a host of other moneymakers.

Tinted Windows (I agree with Pitchfork - can't you get a better name than that?) will be playing at South By Southwest in Austin on March 20th, and though SXSW is the definition of the word "clusterf--k", I now wish I was going.

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