Wednesday, January 20, 2010
When “I Was Scared” first leaked with the rest of Rivers Cuomo’s Alone II home demo volume in 2008, there was a fair amount of speculation revolving around how this song — an apology set to lyrics — might have been written for Mikey Welsh. Welsh was a bassist who, to paraphrase a 2005 Alternative Press […]
Folksy, simple, and all around a very nice little ditty written and sung by Weezer guitarist Brian Bell. Although this song was released as a bonus track for The Red Album (the official coming-out party of Bell, bassist Scott Shriner, and drummer Pat Wilson as lead vocalists on a Weezer record), the performance here is […]
Rivers Cuomo’s home demo cover of “The Bomb” ain’t much to revisit, but it sure is interesting for a single listen. First of all, this is a pre-Blue era cover of an Ice Cube song, of all things — the closing track from his 1990 West Coast rap magnum opus AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. That alone […]
After 21 northeastern winters in a row, I’ve grown pretty damn sick of the season. The cold always seems to pierce through my woolen layers and straight to the bone; the already sickly social scene at my college seems to fall headlong into a frost-bitten coma; and if there’s any magic to be found in […]
Monday, November 23, 2009
Yet another interstitial piece from Rivers Cuomo’s unfinished space rock opera Songs From The Black Hole, this scrappy, 26-second demo was officially released on 2008’s Alone II solo home recording compendium. Written and recorded in 1995, before Cuomo’s first term at Harvard (and the shift from operatic concept album about interstellar travel to opera-inspired concept […]
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Weezer goes reggae. Who would’ve thought? Thankfully the experiment was a brief one, limited to just this song — and as an experiment, it’s an interesting one. The Early Album 5 sessions were pretty curious: for the most part, it was a lazy extension of Rivers Cuomo’s largely uninspired, assembly line Maladroit-style writing, with most […]
“Undone — The Sweater Song” was the first Weezer song to capture the imagination of the alt-rock nation (and in 1994, it really did have enough of a set perimeter and population to be called a “nation”), but “Buddy Holly” was the first to make the band pop superstars. And though the infallible melody and […]
Monday, September 28, 2009
Written dead in the midst of the Summer Songs 2000 period, this was one of the lucky Rivers Cuomo compositions from the 150-odd he wrote that year to make it into the band’s comeback tour setlists — and the subsequent semi-official live MP3 album released to commemorate these songs. (Only three of the fourteen ever […]
Friday, September 25, 2009
Maladroit outtake “So Low” was far from a great song to begin with, but when the band rewrote and re-attempted the song as “Mansion of Cardboard” for what is known as the Early Album 5 sessions (essentially, an early and abortive run of recordings in 2002 for what eventually became 2005’s Make Believe), it could […]
This outcast tune’s Green-era provenance is written all over its plain jane face: doggedly strophic structure, a simple (but catchy) vocal melody, a guitar solo that does little else than to reprise that melody, and lyrics that seem to be about not much of anything at all. I’ve always considered “New Joint” roughly equivalent to […]
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