Say it ain’t so
[I’m exploring 100 podcasts and writing what I learn. This is No. 33.]
I interviewed Rivers Cuomo of Weezer when I was in college. Sort of.
He was famously reclusive and didn’t have a publicist at the time, so I was ecstatic when I was able to get a response through his personal assistant, who also ran the Weezer fan club.
This was in 2002 when Maladroit was coming out, a follow up to the Green Album. Perhaps the only memorable part of this Weezer era was that Rivers grew a beard, long before that became the trendy Indie rock thing.
I was writing a feature about Weezer for my college newspaper and through some internet stalking I managed to score phone interviews with the band’s drummer and bassist. I was even promised a phone interview with Rivers himself, until he backed out and agreed to an email exchange instead.
I sent an email with six questions. In reply, I received 36 total words.
To me, that was perfect. Rivers was known for being eccentric, quiet and private. His responses (or lack thereof) fit the narrative and helped me craft an article that played up his weirdness.
In retrospect, his terse replies probably had less to do with his media-manufactured persona and more to do with him not wanting to waste time on my dumb questions.
Today, Rivers doesn’t seem reclusive or reticent. I recently heard him on All Songs Considered and Song Exploder — and I was struck by his openness and honesty.
The rap against Weezer for anything post Pinkerton is that they don’t care about their fan base and giving them what they want — the raw, confessional music that pioneered emo.
In fact, from these interviews I get the opposite sense. It seems Rivers really cares about his fans and tries hard to please them.
“It’s hard to imagine an artist who works harder or cares more about what his fans think than Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo,” All Songs Considered host Robin Hilton writes.
Rivers talked about working on songwriting five days a week. He keeps a meticulous spreadsheet of lyrics — filled with random slogans or phrases he hears each day — sorted by syllables and where the emphasis lands. Then he mixes and matches this word soup until he orchestrates a song.
Rivers is really proficient at this process. He has it down to an art and a science. The riffs are meaty, the choruses are catchy and the songs easily get stuck in your head.
They’re not bad. But they’re not… great.
On All Songs, Rivers talks about the “crash” he has each time he creates an album he thinks is good, only to have it fall short of fan expectations. He knows the exact Metacritic score of his new album (a very respectable 74) and how that compares to his previous work.
“I always feel great, increasingly great about the record as we get closer to the release — I just feel on cloud nine, super optimistic and confident,” he said. “Then it comes out and I’m faced with the reality is that it’s not perceived as great as it was in my mind.”
One of the most striking parts of the All Songs interview is when he discusses joining Tinder to meet girls in order to get material for songwriting. He said no one wants to hear about his true “middle-aged” life.
“It’s just not appropriate for all audiences if I’m talking about driving kids to school or something,” he said. “I’ve written those songs and they don’t get very far.”
Say it ain’t so.
I feel bad for the 45-year-old Rivers who has to compete against 20-something Rivers. He expressed his struggles writing songs and trying to live up to comparisons to the Blue Album or Pinkerton.
The 1996 masterpiece Pinkerton came from a painful time in Rivers’ life when he was isolated and recovering from surgery that broke his leg in order to lengthen it. The result is vulnerable and feels authentic.
I’m not someone who thinks artists need to suffer or be depressed for their art. But I do think art needs to come from a completely honest place, or it’s not art.
Maybe Rivers does need to create an album about the struggles of being a middle age rock star who picks up his kids from school. Or maybe he just needs to be as honest in his music as he is in his podcast interviews.
If you want to create something people love, you have to almost ignore what others want. But I’m not sure if Weezer or Rivers Cuomo can do that at this point in their career.
“You really care about what fans think about the band,” Robin tells Rivers.
“Yeah, I mean I’m in a room with 15,000 them every night, you know?” Rivers explained. “That is a very real thing. You can’t walk away from that. You can try to. You can pretend, ‘I don’t care what anyone thinks, I’m going to do my own thing.’ But when you’re up there and when you’re with them, you care about it. You want it to be as great and as positive as possible.”
But the paradox is that for fans that crave emotional honesty, you’ll never truly give them what they want as long as you’re trying to give them what they want.
So Weezer will continue to churn out albums with pop hits as long as that’s what Rivers uses his spreadsheets to do.
But until he makes another record just for himself, he’ll never truly satisfy anyone.
