Hackensack

Fountains of Wayne's "Hackensack" is a small, devastating gem of power-pop melancholy, its jangling guitars and gentle midtempo sway masking one of the band's most quietly heartbreaking lyrics. The narrator, stuck working a dead-end job in suburban New Jersey, addresses a former classmate who escaped to Hollywood fame, confessing in plainspoken detail that he's still waiting for her — "I will wait for you / as long as I need to." There's no bitterness, only a touching, almost pathetic loyalty. Chris Collingwood's vocal is warm and resigned, delivering the lines with deadpan tenderness that makes the longing land harder. The arrangement is classic FOW: ringing Rickenbacker chords, a Beatlesque melodic lift, immaculate harmonies, and a hook that feels both nostalgic and freshly aching. Their genius was always pairing hyper-specific, novelistic small-town detail with universal feeling, and here the specificity — paint cans, primer, watching her on TV — turns a sad-sack premise into poetry. It belongs to the early-2000s revival of literate guitar pop. Best heard on a gray afternoon when you're thinking about the one who left and the life you didn't get, it's a song about staying behind that somehow makes standing still feel almost noble. Quietly one of the great unrequited-love songs of its decade.