But Mr. Schlesinger and Mr. Collingwood stood out with witty and sharp-eyed lyrics. Melody and location were central elements to their music, a lesson they derived from Ray Davies of the Kinks, as Mr. Schlesinger told The New York Times in an interview in 1999 for the band’s second album, “Utopia Parkway,” named after a road in Queens.

“When we were teenagers, we liked listening to Kinks records because we’d never been to England, and we got a sense of what it was like to live there,” he said.

With minimal sales, though, the band was dropped from Atlantic. It released its next album, “Welcome Interstate Managers,” in 2003 on the small label S-Curve. That album found some success with “Stacy’s Mom” and reached No. 3 on The Village Voice’s critics’ poll for that year.

Fountains of Wayne released two more studio albums, “Traffic and Weather” (2007) and “Sky Full of Holes” (2011), but had been on hiatus since.

In recent years, Mr. Schlesinger had devoted himself to “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and to the theater world. Two of his Emmy wins were for songs he wrote with Mr. Javerbaum that were performed during Tony Awards telecasts: “It’s Not Just for Gays Anymore,” which won in 2012, and “If I Had Time,” in 2013.

More recently, Mr. Schlesinger had been collaborating with Sarah Silverman on a stage adaptation of her memoir, “The Bedwetter,” which was scheduled to begin performances Off Broadway this month at the Atlantic Theater Company, but was delayed by the pandemic; he wrote the music, and co-wrote the lyrics with Ms. Silverman. And he had begun working with Rachel Bloom of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” to write songs for a musical adaptation of the TV show “The Nanny,” which is in development and aimed at Broadway.