Jody Porter

Although his reputation rests chiefly on his role as lead guitarist with the power pop veterans Fountains of Wayne, Jody Porter first gained experience in the early ’90s as a member of the Belltower, the New York group fronted vocally by his wife at the time, Britta Philips. In 1990 the band moved to London and stayed through the middle of the decade, releasing multiple recordings that fused shoegazing guitar textures with pop and rock structures. Upon returning to the United States, the Belltower briefly enlisted Adam Schlesinger on bass; the group dissolved in 1996, after which Schlesinger formed Fountains of Wayne alongside his former classmate Chris Collingwood. Porter came aboard shortly afterward, yet his first appearance on a Fountains of Wayne album did not occur until Utopia Parkway in 1999.

Throughout the band’s subsequent recordings he shaped its eclectic style by emphasizing understated arpeggios rather than flashy soloing. When Fountains of Wayne paused activities in 2002, Porter launched the Astrojet to showcase his own material; the project issued a six-song EP the next year before he dissolved it in 2004 to concentrate again on Fountains of Wayne, whose Welcome Interstate Managers had unexpectedly propelled the group to wider attention in 2003. He stayed with the band for the remainder of the decade, contributed guest performances to albums by Ivy, Jesse Malin, David Mead, Juliana Hatfield, and Albert Hammond, Jr., and found time for solo work with the 2008 release Close to the Sun, a set of guitar-driven pop songs that he partly produced himself.