Friday, September 3, 2010
Seeing how I did the knee-jerk reaction thing for one of Hurley’s lesser tracks (the unfortunate first single/opener, “Memories”), I thought I’d do something similar for one of the new album’s best. (Two relevant parentheticals, first: though I still deem it a negligible tune, “Memories” does fare a bit better in the context of the [...]
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 [...]
Hot on the heels of “Sheila Can Do (It)” comes another artifact from Rivers Cuomo’s unfinished 1997 sideproject, the Boston-based alt.country of Homie. While many of those songs were old demos and scrapped song ideas that Cuomo was repurposing, this one, “Autumn in Jayne” (a.k.a. “Autumn Jane,” a.k.a. “Autumn and Jane” — both of which [...]
“Devotion” is, without question, the single most depressing song Rivers Cuomo has ever written. That’s no small claim, especially considering the Pinkerton era from whence it came. The song is a b-side to the “El Scorcho” single and, like most Weezer b-sides, is fantastic: most all of the ones we’ve heard are as good if [...]