Rivers Cuomo Is Piecing It All Together
Since the release of the Blue Album, in 1994, Weezer—the alt-rock juggernaut led by the singer and guitarist Rivers Cuomo—has been influential enough that it’s now almost impossible not to hear echoes of Cuomo’s yearning, melodic voice on contemporary pop radio, particularly in punchy, clever songs by Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift. This month, Weezer put out its twentieth studio LP, the Gold Album. Before Cuomo and I sat down to discuss it, he asked if I’d be open to reading some Shakespeare aloud together: specifically, Act I, Scene 7 and Act II, Scene 2 from “Macbeth.” Cuomo attended Harvard beginning in the nineties. He majored in English and took a course on Shakespeare. “I’m kind of obsessed,” he said. “I go see the same plays over and over and over.” We sat opposite each other at a glass dining table in a midtown hotel suite. Cuomo warned me that he was not a great dramatic reader, but his performance was serious, decisive, earnest. Afterward, I told him that it was nice to be reminded of the particular, idiosyncratic music of Shakespeare’s lines. He agreed. “It affects you even if you don’t understand the words sometimes,” he said.
The night before, Cuomo and the band’s drummer, Patrick Wilson, who co-wrote much of the Gold Album, had appeared as guests on the “Tonight Show.” Cuomo wore a billowy gold lamé suit, a gold top hat, and hastily applied gold face paint. Wilson, who was in jeans, a black Carhartt T-shirt, and Sambas, had draped a gold sheet over Cuomo’s chair so that he wouldn’t smear the upholstery. After chatting with Jimmy Fallon, the band performed “We Might as Well Be Strangers,” a scrappy, distorted new song from the album, which features guest vocals from Karly Hartzman, of the band Wednesday. (Hartzman, who is currently on tour in Europe, was unable to join.) Over the years, Weezer has experimented relentlessly with form, toggling between pop, punk, emo, metal, and even classical—2021’s “OK Human” featured a thirty-eight-piece orchestra—but the Gold Album, with its urgent, chatty rock songs, feels like the band at its most elemental.
Cuomo was born in New York City and raised in various spiritual communities around the Northeast, including Yogaville, an ashram then situated in Pomfret, Connecticut. Now fifty-six, he is a gentle and thoughtful presence. He still wears glasses. On occasion, he closed his eyes before responding to one of my questions, as though he were waiting for an answer to appear on a chalkboard deep in his mind. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.
Have you ever written literary prose?
Yes. I think I imagined that someday I would put out some kind of writing, in a later stage of life. I’m now in those later stages, so. The project I’m most excited about right now is a section of my website called Lore. I’m collecting every experience I’ve ever had, in writing, from my own memory, and then also interviewing other people. It’s this giant resource for anyone who’s doing any kind of biography thing.
Do you imagine threading it together into a meaningful narrative—a book?
That’s somebody else’s job. I like recalling all the details, and not trying to make sense of it all. The part that I enjoy is just getting the events in order—almost like an O.C.D. thing or something. It’s a detective story. “Wait a minute, if I went to pick up my shoes in Manchester, Connecticut, on November 2, 1986, that means I must have gone to Berklee after that.” That sort of thing. I don’t know why—it’s just really fun to put the puzzle together.
It’s forensic, almost.
Which is different from catharsis.
Well, catharsis often comes from the imposition of meaning.
Yeah, I don’t do that. Or sometimes I do that, and then I go back and cross it out. It just feels icky, when I go back and read it. It’s, like, “Oh, that’s me now, having some kind of reaction to something that happened forty years ago.” I don’t care about that.
Serialization itself is interesting—the inadvertent or almost incidental meaning that can come from putting one thing next to another thing. I’ve written a little bit about collectors of very rare 78-r.p.m. records. It’s a pretty oddball subculture, and they’re really obsessive about their work. In the fifties, there was a collector named Harry Smith, who compiled “The Anthology of American Folk Music” for Folkways—
Oh, yeah!
He collected mostly prewar American vernacular records. He was very big on completion and serialization. That was a sense-making process for him, acquiring each item in a series, and putting them in the proper order.
That’s one hundred per cent what I’m talking about.
And, for you, there’s peace at the end of that?
It’s soothing. It’s like getting your room super organized or something. I don’t have O.C.D., so I don’t know where this comes from. It’s a lot of journal entries, a lot of letters, and a lot of me re-creating memories—fleshing out the journals, giving them a little more context. Letters from my mom to dad, and vice versa. And then even going back before my life, to my parents’ lives.
Are you learning things about yourself through it?
Yeah. Boy, yeah. I learned a lot about my dad, and that kind of shined some light on my relationship with my son, too.
You were four or five when your dad moved out, and you were raised chiefly by your mom. Is that right?
Well, I only ever heard my mom’s side of the story. And now I’m going back and seeing all these letters he wrote to us. I have no memory of them. I don’t know if I saw them. I would characterize it more as—we left. We moved from New York to Connecticut and joined the ashram. And, I don’t know, it might have been something like, “You don’t have to pay child support, but you can’t be a big part of the kids’ lives.” I really idolized my dad, and missed him. I was really young. It left a big hole in my heart, for sure.
How long did you go without seeing your dad?
I saw him when I was five, when I was seven, when I was eleven, and when I was sixteen. And then not again until my mid-twenties.
What was it like when you encountered each other again in your twenties?
Well, that was awkward.
You were a rock star by then.
Well, yeah. And it was when we’d put out the first album, and we had that song “Say It Ain’t So.” [On the bridge, Cuomo sings, “Dear Daddy, I write you / In spite of years of silence / You’ve cleaned up, found Jesus / Things are good, or so I hear / This bottle of Steven’s / Awakens ancient feelings / Like father, stepfather / The son is drowning in the flood.”] Somehow, I ended up with a lot of anger toward him, and bitterness, and so I just let it rip in that song. I hadn’t seen him in years, so it was scary having to deal with the fallout from that creative choice. I didn’t have a phone at the time, I just had a fax machine. And one day, out of the blue, I got a fax from my father. And he said, “We have to talk.” It was scary. He was a scary guy.
A stomach-drop moment, I’m sure.
But, yeah, that’s what he did. If you’re gonna write about somebody like that . . . I certainly thought he deserved it. But now I can see this giant pile of letters from him, where he was saying both to my mother and to me and my brother how much he loved us, and how proud he was of us. I didn’t know that. Either I didn’t see the letters, or I was a kid and I didn’t care, and I forgot about them. I feel like I picked up some stories through the ether, through the cultural narrative, in the eighties, of abusive fathers, alcoholic fathers, fathers that abandon their kids. Somehow, that became my story. I don’t know how true that was.
Memory is so fallible. The stories that we tell ourselves about our lives—they are not always true.
Yeah. It’s very pertinent to me now, because I’m trying so hard to connect to my son, and I’m mostly failing, and it’s not for lack of trying. I think: What if for some reason he ended up growing up thinking I didn’t care about him?
How did you find the letters from your dad?
I scanned them about twenty years ago, and I just never really got around to processing them. But then my dad died in January. So I went to his house, and then I found that he had saved every letter we’d ever sent to him, and also letters from my mother. And she wrote a lot. So I was able to get those, and then, looking at everything, started to reconstruct a different perspective on that relationship.
When your dad sent you that fax, was that the beginning of a new relationship with him?
Yeah, I’d say that was the beginning of a newer relationship. And then he moved—he lived in Germany for a few decades, so that was part of the disconnect. But then probably from 2000 on, he lived in L.A., not too far from me. He came to my college graduation, and my wedding.
I watched the band on the “Tonight Show” last night. The gold suit, was that something you came up with?
No. I heard about it from my manager. I don’t know who came up with it.
Someone said, “Rivers, you’re going full gold.” And you just said, “Alright.”
Yeah. I like costumes.
Speaking of costumes, within the Weezer discography, it feels to me as though there are records or songs where the lyrics are coming from a pretty autobiographical place. You, Rivers, are very present and central in the songs. I’m thinking of the Blue Album and “Pinkerton,” I suppose. And then there are other eras where it’s maybe more of a persona, or at least there seems to be some distance between you and the narrator. How do you think about the lyrics on the new record? Are they confessional?
I’d say it’s a hodgepodge. I used all different kinds of techniques. Also, the other guys wrote a fair amount of the lyrics. “Pinkerton” feels much more personal than the Blue Album to me. This new album, it’s hard for me to really understand what it is yet, because there were so many songs, and most of them got cut. I think there are moments of real personal revelation, but I do remember a lot of times where I would write something like that and the other guys would not like it. I had to depersonalize it sometimes.
See, for me, as a listener, those awkward moments are always the moments I connect with the most. But there are probably also times where it’s advantageous to pull it back a little.
Yeah. The lyrics were a real struggle for me on this record because, on records past, I just wrote what I wrote and nobody says anything, and maybe it makes them cringe, but . . . I write the lyrics. Now people speak up if something’s bothering them. It’s, like, “I really don’t like how that line makes me feel. Can you come up with something else?”
How does that kind of feedback land on you?
It never feels good, but I’ve been doing this now for so long that I know that we’ve gotta find that intersection on the Venn diagram, where everybody’s excited about the song.
This record has two primary songwriters—you and Patrick Wilson, who plays drums in Weezer—and two producers, Kenneth Blume and Klas Åhlund. Was there ever a moment when you felt as if there were too many cooks in the kitchen? When you wanted to go back to just making records by yourself?
It felt like a lot of cooks in the kitchen, for sure, but there was a lot of food to be made. We compressed a lot of great ideas into the standard album length. Everyone brought something different.
Kenneth Blume also produced Geese’s “Getting Killed.” Are you a Geese fan?
Yeah, absolutely. Love that guy’s voice, and the lyrics.
They’re pretty abstract, but I find them—they make me cry.
Yeah, same.
I also like the violence of that Geese record. And there’s, like, a little bit of that violence on this record, too—it’s rough and rowdy in places. Was that part of why you wanted to work with Kenneth?
Yeah. That was why we wanted to work with him. Initially, that was Patrick’s idea. It was very important to him and to our bass player, Scott [Shriner]—they love danger, violence. Those are the words they use. I’m historically more drawn to precision, power, and attention to detail, and that’s why I reached out to Klas first. The other guys were really craving some of that violence. And Klas said, “Well, I just made a record, with another producer, by this band called Show Me the Body. And I think he might be what we’re looking for on this record.”
I don’t know Klas’s work as well as Kenny’s, but I tend to presume things about the Swedish sensibility when it comes to pop-music production—what Max Martin has called “melodic math.” There is a precision and a balance to the work that seems as though it could be at odds with what Kenny does. A yin-yang situation. But it really works—the record feels very cohesive and coherent to me. I don’t know quite how you did it, but you did it.
Thank you. That is a compliment that is very meaningful to me. I was just sitting in the center of all this. It felt like getting pushed and pulled in all these different directions. Just trying to keep an open mind, and always give everyone’s idea a chance.
Are there songs or lyrics or things that got left on the cutting-room floor that you feel heartbroken about?
No. I just let it go. Let me add that I really trust our band to make these decisions together. And, if it’s painful to lose an idea, a lyric, or a melody or something, I know if those three guys are telling me it’s better to change that, I really trust that, even if it doesn’t feel great in the moment. I’ve gone the other way in the past: “We’re doing it my way.” It never turns out well.
“Nowhere” is my favorite song on the new record. In terms of the sound of your vocals, were you looking for something hot and unprocessed?
I’m gonna give all the credit to Kenny. He had me singing louder than I ever remember singing, and consistently. Even in these sections where I would naturally sing very softly, he was, like, “Louder! Harder!” He actually kept urging me to sing like a sex god—which, I had no idea what he meant. But I was trying.
On “C.E.O.,” it feels as though you’re contemplating the idea of legacy. What people want from you, what songs they want you to play—it raises this question of who you were when you were in your early twenties versus who you are now. Reading about your work and your life, it feels like there’s a lot of binaries at play: then and now, East Coast and West Coast, introvert and extrovert, art and commerce.
Right. Yeah, that does sound like me. I like to construct dilemmas for myself.
Do you think it’s generative for you, to have two things in tension?
Does this strike you as unusual? Is everyone not like that?
I don’t think it’s uncommon, exactly, but I think it feels particularly present for you. Though, of course, we also just met.
[Laughs.] No, it sounds right. I always find myself, in recent years, thinking of Scylla and Charybdis—trying to navigate through these two mortal dangers on either side of me. Which is maybe a little different than what you’re saying; it’s not choosing one or the other.
How have you found getting older?
It’s good. I think the thing that strikes me most is that my relationships are better now. A lot more harmony. That’s maybe the most important thing, as far as the quality of your day-to-day lived experience—the harmony of your relationships. It’s so good now.
Weezer tours a lot. Do you get lonely on the road?
Yeah.
I suppose that’s the job. And you found success with the band so young—this is probably the only job you’ve ever really known.
Well, I delivered pizza for Domino’s. [Laughs.] I was eighteen. I worked in a fast-food restaurant. The one job I really loved, and I think I still would love, was construction. We did all kinds of stuff. But my favorite was completely rebuilding a house, from studs up. It was, like, an old shack that we turned into a real guesthouse. Every day, it gets a little better, nicer. Looks more like a house.
I think of writing in that way, too—as construction. It’s almost modular. You’re putting a puzzle together, and this thing is emerging, but slowly. You just hope it’s structurally sound. Then, at the end, which is the fun part, you get to put the door knocker on, pick the sconces. All the little details.
So you’re not starting from the first sentence and writing to the end and going back and changing a few things?
Almost never. Do you start with the first line of a song?
No. What percentage of what you write ends up in the piece?
These days it’s pretty high, because I like to think I have gotten close to figuring out what that magazine wants from me. This kind of writing also requires veracity. That’s less of a factor in songwriting, I presume.
What’s analogous to veracity . . . the only thing I can think of is precision in playing. It can be quite a slippery slope when you’re looking at a Pro Tools grid, and you can see where you were supposed to have struck the drum, and then where you actually did. And it’s just a matter of moving it back a little bit. Some producers will get much more picky about that and spend a lot of time aligning the playing to the grid. But, for Weezer, right now, I think it’s very important to disregard the grid and go with vibe and energy and veracity—the other kind of veracity, the veracity of the performance, over precision. And that really is coming from Patrick. He’s the real visionary when it comes to the aesthetic of the album.
At the heart of any of the tracks, it’s a live recording. In some cases, we would add more instruments; it’s not literally completely a live recording. But the big difference—and this doesn’t mean anything to a non-recording artist—is we’re not recording on a grid. A grid means the beat is the same in every bar of the song, and there’s no fluctuation in tempo. Almost all records have been made that way since the nineties. But we decided not to do that this time.
You seem like someone who has engaged pretty earnestly and in good faith with new forms of technology. There’s a lot of panic right now about the bumpy intersection of artificial intelligence and art-making. Does that interest you at all? Or do you find it repulsive, in the sense that it will inevitably dehumanize this whole process? Or both, maybe?
I would say I was more interested a few years ago. When ChatGPT first came out, it seemed like, wow, this is pretty great. You can have it write these novelty lyrics about some obscure topic, and it’s pretty good! It’s pretty funny. But I don’t feel like it’s progressed beyond that, so I kind of just lost interest. Has it gotten really awesome?
I don’t think so. Conversely, as the novelty has worn off, I think it’s gotten incredibly off-putting. I teach writing at N.Y.U., and I was worried that my students would use ChatGPT for their assignments, and it would be demoralizing. But I found that they, too, seemed deeply uninterested in it. This technology was being shoved down their throats, and yet they were resistant to it—I found that interesting and cool.
Yeah. If anything, maybe it’s had the opposite effect, where we want more imperfections: we want proof that an A.I. didn’t polish it. A.I. will give you the most average answer, the most average song. Something that is right in the middle of the road. It just makes me more hungry for something eccentric, something oddball.
I wanted to ask you about “Hoops.” It opens with this story about buying a toaster and having to scan a QR code. The first verse is preceded by a spoken intro: “This is a true story.” The whole thing sort of reminded me of Bob Dylan. Both the Dylanesque absurdity of the lyrics and then the Dylanesque nature of that question: What’s a true story, anyway?
[Laughs.] I think I just literally meant I’m about to tell you a story about a toaster, and this actually happened, I didn’t make it up. Unfortunately, I don’t think I was thinking that philosophically when I said it.
Perhaps I am over-intellectualizing it! [Laughs.] Which leads me to another question: Do you think of Weezer as something separate from your more intellectual pursuits? Is that another binary in your life, Weezer versus academia?
I think there’s quite a bit of overlap there. I try for full overlap, but sometimes my intellectual interests don’t fit in the context of a three-minute pop-rock song. I have to set that aside.
What ideas have been interesting to you lately?
Well, I told you my favorite pet project now, which is Lore. And I do an awful lot of computer programming still. Ideas-wise—I like reading books that I’m not interested in, to expand my mind. Instead of following my own curiosity, I have lists of the most highly regarded books, both fiction and nonfiction, and I just read through those lists. I’d say seventy-five per cent of the time, it’s boring. But usually I end up feeling like my mental boundaries have been pushed or extended a little bit. And then I have more context when I go on to read another book about twentieth-century Chinese political history. It’s, like, “Oh, yeah, I know something about this. This is cool.”
Are you reading something all the time?
That’s another thing I’m interested in. I got inspired by my mom, because she’s very into her budget. She has budgeting software, and she spends a lot of time fine-tuning her budget. She tries to stick to it. My expenses are so much lower than my income that I have no need for a budget. But, eventually, it dawned on me that I can make an attention budget. So, I wrote down all the things that I want to pay attention to, and then how much time I’d like to allot to each of those items. And then now I track what I do pay attention to throughout the day. I use my budget, my plan, to try to help me stay more in alignment with what I’d like to be paying attention to. So when you asked me how much time I spend reading, I can tell you both how much I’ve spent reading this year but also how much time I’d like to be reading every day.
Are those numbers out of whack?
No, they’re pretty close. I’m spending too much time with this Lore project. I’m, like, five hundred minutes over. I have to cut back. I’m not going in chronological order. For example, I was just visited by an old friend, an old bandmate from my metal band when we were nineteen or twenty years old. He stayed with me for five nights, and the whole time we just talked about the old stories. I have notes on all of that, so, right now, I’m turning all of those into Lore entries. But, next week, I may be talking to my mom, and talking about something from when I was two.
When did you officially start the Lore project?
I’d say it started when I was kid, because I had this irrational attachment to everything in my life. I couldn’t throw away anything; my room was a mess. It was filled with all kinds of detritus. I had an empty box that once contained a hairspray can I used. Even back then, I was collecting stuff. But then, maybe twenty years ago, I thought about writing a book about the early years of the band. I interviewed maybe forty people, and I was converting all of those notes to a book. Then I gave up. The whole project seemed distasteful to me. Why did I get interested in it again recently? Maybe it was when my dad died, being presented with all this cool archival stuff. Even just for my family, I want to share and get all these letters in chronological order, so we can all digest this together.
Do you see there being an end to it?
I don’t think I could ever complete it.
Why do you think the book project became distasteful for you?
A big obstacle was: How do you handle material that may upset other people?
Yeah, how do you? I guess one way is that you wait for them to die—
Yep.
—or you just say, “It’s my story, too.” I wanted to ask you about another new song, “Say Yes,” which I understand used to be called “School Sucks”?
Yeah. I was writing to my son about all the pressure he was under at school to do homework and classwork, and that sucks. I get it. I don’t blame him.
I first heard the chorus—“Say yes, even if I don’t believe that it’s true”—as being about saying yes to things that you don’t really wanna do, but you have to because you’re the lead singer of this very popular band.
Oh, yeah. [Laughs.] That makes a lot of sense, but that’s not what I was thinking about when I wrote it. Somehow, I think your generation thinks of us as an indie band, but we were very willfully rebelling against everything indie when we started. We had no interest in that. Back then, bands would make seven-inch singles and sign to an independent label, put stickers up on the walls of the clubs and all that. We were just, like, “We’re gonna try to get a major-label deal, get on MTV.” And it felt very rebellious, because indie was trendy. Somehow, now, we’re kind of lumped in with that. But that whole alternative-rock, major-label thing is gone.
To be fair, you guys kind of looked the part. I think the way that Weezer dressed back then, you could have been on Matador. If I looked at a picture of Weezer in 1994, and a picture of Pavement—
Yeah, that’s true. But, at the time, no one mistook us for a real indie band. We were definitely major-label poseurs.
I suppose you’ve never been afraid of success—
We were afraid of failure! [Laughs.]
A more reasonable fear! Although, failure has been an interesting engine in your life. I mean, that is the sort of lore of “Pinkerton,” at least. You tried to write one thing and ended up writing a very different thing, and nobody liked it at first.
Yeah. I think it would be cooler, though, if “Pinkerton” had been a big success. [Laughs.] I tried to explain “Pinkerton” to David Geffen in, like, 2001. I told him, “It didn’t do well, but now it’s a cult phenomenon.” He said, “ ‘Cult phenomenon’ is a euphemism for failure.”
Do you think that’s true?
Not wholly. I mean, I don’t think you can treat cult phenomena like success. But there are worse kinds of failure.
Sometimes a piece of art simply does not align entirely with its time and place. I don’t know if that’s always a failure of the artist.
But those songs still don’t get played on the radio. They still don’t get synched in movies or TV commercials.
That’s true, but that’s also just one measure of success. They resonate for the people they resonate for, and in a big way. How do you feel about that record now?
I like it.
Do you have a favorite Weezer record?
No.
After three decades toiling away in the music industry, which is sort of famously unstable, what’s the biggest change you’ve witnessed?
Well, not much has changed for us. Our process is very similar. I mean, I’ve been doing the same things since I was fourteen. Pick up a guitar, sit at the piano, write a song. Get together with the guys. Two guitars, bass, and drums. Record it. Go in front of an audience. There’s less of a sense of the gatekeepers, the people who could make or break your song or your band, if only they like your record, that sort of thing. But if you’re lucky, like we’ve been, for some reason some old song starts happening on TikTok, and you have the new hit again. I do have a sense of nostalgia for the old record business. I think there are some great A. & R. guys and label execs that would really help nurture and develop an artist, make sure their records were of the highest quality. Now it’s much more democratized, especially on TikTok, which is less possible to game. I think, in the past, if you were a very successful legacy artist, you could hope to get some support from the powers that be. Now that’s meaningless—there are no powers that be. No one has any idea how this works. ♦