In the past 24 hours the music world has lost pop-rock songwriting wonder ADAM SCHLESINGER, New Orleans jazz patriarch ELLIS MARSALIS, new wave singer CRISTINA and dance artist manager GARY SALZMAN, all to Covid-19, and if you want an objective accounting of that roll call, go somewhere else, my heart's broken in a million pieces, I'm angry and I'm exhausted. A toll of 200,000 deaths will not mean someone's done "a very good job." Four deaths on Tuesday is a cultural tragedy and a national failure. (Jazz guitarist BUCKY PIZZARELLI also died Tuesday, please stop it, world, but he had been in poor health for years and the cause hasn't been reported.) I've probably needed to cry for a few weeks, but Adam Schlesinger's death was the gut-punch. We're a similar age, we're both northeastern, suburban, regular-dude Jews, and he had spent the past quarter-century not quite singing my life with his words—he wasn't the lead singer in any of his bands—but, let's say, composing my life with his words and melodies. His eye for the detail of ordinary suburban strivers was every bit as sharp as the well-chronicled ear for criminally catchy hooks that he deployed over the course of six FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE albums, five IVY albums, one TINTED WINDOWS album, one unforgettable hit song for a fake '60s rock band in a TOM HANKS movie, 157 songs for the TV series CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND, one Broadway musical, one off-Broadway musical, one MONKEES song and let's just stipulate there was a lot of other stuff. Fountains of Wayne were the purest expression of that particular point of view, with songs chronicling guys who walk into tattoo parlors with "some Bactine to prevent infection" and hope to walk out looking "a little more like that guy from KORN," and women who work in midtown cubicles, "making the scene with the coffee and cream / And the copy machine's not working." I don't know exactly which characters and which lyrics were Schlesinger's; he and singer CHRIS COLLINGWOOD wrote largely separately but shared songwriting credit on everything. The vision was the product of one of power pop's greatest hiveminds. They were a kind of Springsteen for less-desperate, less-romantic nine-to-fivers; there was less denim and leather and a little more awkwardness in the romance. I've always loved "I-95," whose narrator has pulled into a rest stop in the middle of a nine-hour drive down the title interstate and is in the gift shop taking inventory of the GUNS N' ROSES posters, BARNEY DVDs and "coffee mugs and tees that say Virginia is for lovers / But it's not." A sad landscape, but he'll keep doing that nine-hour drive if he needs to, just to see you. I've lived that line, minus a few hours, and it still makes me cry. RIP... Oh, and if you need proof of Schlesinger's melodic chops, here's an assignment: Write a song that has the shimmer of the early BEATLES but isn't quite the Beatles, that you can play over and over and over again in less than two hours and no one will get sick of it, and that will please Tom Hanks. Let me know when you come up with one... Also, this, which probably belongs a little higher up (both the sentiment and the song). Dammit. He was 52. He should have had all kinds of time... HARVARD law professor DAVID WILKINS on ELLIS MARSALIS, as shared Tuesday night by Ellis' son BRANFORD: "We can all marvel at the sheer audacity of a man who believed he could teach his black boys to be excellent in a world that denied that very possibility, and then watch them go on to redefine what excellence means for all time"... MusicSET: "The Toll: Artists Lost to the Coronavirus"... DOLLY PARTON donating $1 million to VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY for coronavirus research. And reading bedtime stories... RIP also RONN MATLOCK.