Saturday, December 5, 2015
Following the failure of Pinkerton, Rivers Cuomo spent half a decade smothering one of the brightest pop songwriting muses of our time. After some early indicators, the first real product of this process was 2001’s Green Album, a 28-minute-thin slice of early Beatles songcraft sieved through the compression filter of safe, formulaic late ’90s radio rock. “Photograph” is the […]
Monday, December 20, 2010
For my money, “Buttefly” might very well be the best thing Rivers Cuomo’s ever done. I usually vacillate between this one and “Only in Dreams” as Weezer’s definitive moment (and sometimes the defiantly great Red era outtake “Pig,” even), and at 8 minutes, “Dreams” has a bit of an inherent advantage — it is conspicuously […]
Tonight, on Teenage Victory Songs, we will be going over some of the reasons why “Blowin’ My Stack” is a modern Weezer classic. You are invited to download it and listen first, or read along as you go. 1. Starting a song about blowing out your amp with a riff played through…well, a blown-out amp. […]
Saturday, August 14, 2010
When Rivers Cuomo opened up Weezer’s songwriting (and lead microphone) to his three bandmates on 2008’s Red Album, it struck both critics and fans as a surprising move from such a typically autocratic frontman. But the gesture was not nearly as unprecedented as Cuomo’s even more recent enthusiasm for collaborating on Weezer songs with outside […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Billy Joel has always had a surprisingly strong influence on Rivers Cuomo, at least as far as this side of the new millennium is concerned. There’s the matter of Joel’s “Leningrad,” the introductory piano figure of which Cuomo shamelessly cribbed for the main melody line of 2001 b-side “I Do” — a surprisingly nice listen, […]
I’m often accused of hyperbole on this here songblog, and I will concede that these claims aren’t always inaccurate. But this is one grand statement I can truly stand by: “The Spider” is the most misunderstood song Weezer has ever released. As the third of four “Deluxe version” bonus tracks for 2008’s Red Album, “The […]