Chris Collingwood (born October 3, 1967) is an American singer, songwriter, and artist. He is best known as the former lead vocalist and founding member of the power pop band Fountains of Wayne.
Though Collingwood and Schlesinger shared cowriter credit for all original Fountains of Wayne material, for most of their career together, they wrote their songs separately. The band was nominated for a Grammy Award for their song "Stacy's Mom", in 2004, which charted at number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100.
In 2006, the band was touring in Tokyo, Japan, when Collingwood experienced a mental breakdown. Prior to his breakdown, he had been experiencing hallucinations for two days, and was sleep deprived and mentally unstable to the point that he did not believe he was actually in Japan. The performance was cancelled, and Collingwood spent time recovering in hospitals in both Japan and the United States. He later recalled the event, saying:[4]
Every town you go to, they want there to be a party and everywhere you go, there's free liquor...You end up turning your entire tour into a party. When we were in Japan in 2006, I hadn't slept in four, five days and started hallucinating in Tokyo.
I ended up going to the hospital and they were pumping me full of sedatives to put me to sleep. It happens to meth heads – not sleeping, seeing shadow people and having horrific hallucinations. Nothing ever scared me more than just not being able to control my own brain or trust what I'm seeing, hearing or feeling.
After many years as an alcoholic, Collingwood became sober by 2011. He would become more involved in the production of their album, Sky Full of Holes, although, it would end up being the hardest for the group to make, collectively:[4]
The most recent record was definitely the hardest that we've ever done. I think I'm partly to blame for that. I checked out on the previous record, so when I came back in, I had to assert myself. Every single thing about that record was a fight. It was not this blissful reconciliation that led to the release; it was a brutal thing right up to the end. We'll see what happens if we end up making another record.
The band split up in 2013. Despite departing, the band never issued a statement about their endings, and fans started to speak about the band in past tense by 2016.
Schlesinger died in 2020, and the surviving band members held an online charity event shortly after, which was the first time the band had played with each other since their 2013 split, to help raise funding for the New Jersey Pandemic Relief Fund.
Solo
Collingwood released his debut album as a solo artist in 2016, under the band name Look Park. The album also included contributions by: Davey Faragher (bass), Mitchell Froom (keyboard/producer), Mike Viola, Flora Reed, and Philip Price (all backing vocals), and was engineered and mixed by David Boucher.[5]
