Thursday, October 7, 2010
I hesitate to call any one lost Weezer song “the one that got away,” because there are so many: Green era demos like “No Way” and “Burning Sun,” the Make Believe version of “Love is the Answer” (later desecrated by Raditude trendchasing and Sugar Ray’s Sugar Rayness) and other tantalizing outtakes of ’05 like “Last […]
It goes without saying that The Blue Album and Pinkerton are two very different beasts — the latter album’s commercial failure was proof that it was not the kind of record people expected after songs like “Undone” and “Buddy Holly.” But listening in hindsight, it’s clear that there’s a common thread between the two albums. […]
Once you get to a certain size and age as a band, it’s inevitable that you start making mistakes. A dozen million record sales and well over 15 years on the odometer definitely qualifies. And as the discography burgeons, with all its offshoots into outtakes, demos, and other strata of availability, the severity of a […]
I’ve already spent some time explaining why the Red Album b-sides were such a letdown, so I won’t belabor the point here. But it suffices to say that with “Love My Way,” once again some very incomplete fraction of the band covered a good song poorly — in this case, drummer Pat Wilson does a […]
On March 24, 2002, Rivers Cuomo issued a “Fair Warning” to his fans on a certain Weezer message board, the contents of which simply read: “rock/rap.” It was a threat, and in the midst of 2002 it was one that resonated deeply — at the time the combination meant Rage Against the Machine at best, […]
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Looking at the original lyric sheet for the pre-Blue Album song “Paperface” is a pretty rare (and funny) treat. There is an aborted attempt at a verse that begins, “I played the game / I was all right / For a while / I didn’t fight,” which Rivers Cuomo scribbled over with an emphatic “CRAP” (made […]
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
For years, “The Story Of My Life” was one of just several hundred unheard and unknown songs from one of Weezer’s many dark-age periods of apparent inactivity — one of the diehard fanbase’s favorite topics of speculation and obsession. This one comes from the period between 2002’s Maladroit and 2005’s Make Believe. It was a […]
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 […]
Interestingly, this Maladroit outtake was actually written in late 2000, somewhere inbetween Rivers Cuomo’s shift from Green Album writing to what was coming next: the last song before it that we have on the COR is Green sugar cookie “Knock-Down Drag-Out” and eventual Maladroit single “Keep Fishin’.” It was attempted a couple of times during […]