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Your Room

This song first surfaced during an SnS demo sessions dated 9/6/01 (bassist Scott Shriner’s first recordings with Weezer, if I’m not mistaken), and appeared many more times on the way to Maladroit, the album it failed to make. It was played with some regularity on the band’s Extended Hyper Midget Tour of late 2001, four instances of which were posted to the band’s official website as free downloads. From there, six studio demo versions of the song from the Mala sessions were released that same way, dated between 12/20/01 and 1/12/02.

For all the time that apparently was spent on it, it’s remarkable just how little “Your Room” developed or improved in its life as a Weezer song. Not that it was much of a song to begin with: it’s essentially two minutes of circular, destinationless riff-rock that has two haphazard vocal sections that we might as well call “the chorus” (they’re identical). Some versions are a little bit better than others, though the differences are largely immaterial — though if someone were to threaten violence in forcing me to listen to this song, I’d probably choose the 12/08/01 live take or the 12/20/01 studio version.

You’re coming up worlds away
There’s nothing that I can say
And all of these games you play
Will lead you to your room

That’s the lyric sheet in it’s entirety, and while I found a lonely comment on this song on SongMeanings by some guy convinced that this is a song about a girl who cheats, it clearly means fuck-all — whether you’re the listener or Rivers Cuomo himself. As for this here chorus section, the way the second line creates some tension with the chord progression (especially as Brian Bell parenthetically echoes, “I can say”) is a nice little musical moment that is just about the song’s sole redeeming factor in my book — far from sufficient for me to ever seek it out, but that moment would be one that could fit nicely in the context of a “real” (better, finished) song.

“Your Room” in a nutshell? Not good, not awful, and no real reason to exist.

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