February 2, 2021 • 51 mins
Most people know Rivers Cuomo as Weezer’s brilliant, quirky lead singer. But one thing people may not know, is that several years ago, a bizarre conspiracy theory made its way around the Web that Rivers was actually Kurt Cobain. To mark the release of Weezer's incredibly catchy new album, OK Human, Rivers explains to Rick Rubin why the band ditched their classic guitar-based style for an orchestral sound. They also talk about the specific substances Rivers took to write his hit song “Hash Pipe,” and Rivers entertains the Kurt Cobain conspiracy as if it were all true.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Most people know Rivers Cuomo as Weezer's brilliant, quirky
bleed sing chops of water flood cascading from the sky
(00:36):
and it streaks my winship who I opened up the door.
But one thing you may not know is that several
years ago a bizarre conspiracy theory started to make its
way around the web. The Rivers was actually Kurt Cobain,
(00:57):
as in Kurt stage Is suicide in nineteen ninety four
and carried on living his life as Rivers Cuomo. While
Nirvana and Weezer at seemingly opposite ends of the nineties
music spectrum, a close look reveals they're actually a lot
more similar than you might think. In anticipation of Weezer's
ambitious and incredibly catchy new album Okay Human, Rivers explains
(01:19):
to Rick Rubin why the band ditched their classic guitar
based style for an orchestral sound. They also talk about
the specific substances that Rivers took to write the hit
song hash Pipe, and Rivers entertains the Kurt Cobain conspiracy
and plays along with Rick as if it were all true.
This is broken record. Liner notes for the digital age
(01:41):
I'm justin Richmonds. Here are old friends Rick Rubin and
Rivers Cuomo talking over zoom. Have you seen the website,
the conspiracy website that says that Kurt Cobain did not
kill himself and that it's actually you are Kurt Cobain.
(02:02):
Have you seen that? Yeah, I've heard of that is
I hadn't seen the website before, and then just just
yesterday somebody forwarded it to me. Is that like suddenly
going around for some reason? It's I know that conspiracy
has been around for a long time. I don't know.
I just thought. I just thought the other day, and
I thought interesting, and I thought it might even be
interesting if I were to ask you questions as if
(02:24):
it were true, because that could be fun for both
of us. Yeah. So, if if you were Kurt, tell
me how you imagine you would have transformed yourself into Rivers. Well,
first of all, I'd have to stage my death, which
seems seems easy enough. And then yeah, the Blue album
(02:47):
came out a month later after he died. You could
have been you could have been working on that like
for years. Yeah, and I know he was. He seemed
to be very interested in very like innocent naive music,
like they covered the Raincoats, which is not that different
(03:08):
from Wheezer. I guess, you know, major key and we
kind of picked up picked up that ball and ran
with it. So yeah, I think kind of running the
opposite direction from grunge and you know where the button
down shirts and cut your hair short and and sing
with a very pure voice rather than rock voice. Yeah,
(03:31):
it seems like that would be a nice um if you, like,
if you're tired of being Kurt Cobain, this might be
a nice career decision, like get away from all that madness,
essentially canceled the past and starting new with no none
of the old pressure of being in this the band
(03:52):
that changed the world, and where you could just have
fun and write pop songs and enjoy yourself. Yeah, I
guess the grass is always greener, but yeah, and I
think for for everyone outside of Nirvana, it seemed like
he had did pretty good. Like that's what we all wanted, right,
We want to be not only the band that's selling
(04:15):
ten gazillion records, but like the band that everyone knows
like they revolutionized music and culture. You know, they're always
going to be that band and the rest of us
We're just like little little dwarfs kind of dancing around
their heels. But it looks like it felt bad enough
for him to either end his life or decide to
(04:39):
become you. One of the two, which is better? She
is different stylistically. Did you have any in the transition
from the songs you wrote for Nirvana versus the Weezer
(04:59):
songs you wrote you decide to, like really clear the
decks and and think of it in a new way.
I think it all it all came about because I
changed my style of singing. Now. When I was singing
the very thick rock voice, so many overtones and all
this distortion. Naturally in my vocal chords, I was able
(05:22):
to sing one melody four times in a row and
call that a verse four times in a row and
call that a chorus, and no one would get tired
of my voice because it was so rich. But once
they started singing with a very pure voice, like a
choirboy voice like you hear in say Buddy Holly, I
had to change my melody writing in my chord writing
(05:44):
because the voice just wasn't as rich. You gotta put
the variation and the richness into the composition. So At
that point I started writing a lot more involved chord
progressions and melodies. Interesting, did you let anyone at all
know what was going to happen or to be played? All?
(06:05):
Pretty close to the best? I let my lawyer, No.
But apart from that, I wanted to complete break. Were
there any things that happened early on where you felt
like you might get caught? No, there's there's been these
conspiracies and movies about me, about my death, and I
(06:28):
don't think anyone's really ever come close to figuring it
out because it's Wheezer is just so different from Nirvana.
Yes and no. Yes, I mean you both do the
soft loud thing. You've sort of kept that in the repertoire. Yeah,
I did that without even noticing. Honestly, Yeah, it's just habit.
(06:52):
I hadn't yet broken. I thought the idea of adding
the glasses was a great idea because it really is,
like it's a perfect It camouflages your face in a
way that it really does create a new persona. Yeah,
but I did wear them in the big Nirvana video
(07:13):
I was in Bloom, So it's just like a little
breadcrumb for people who are really paying attention. I guess foreshadowing. Yeah,
you know, I was actually shooting that video that gave
me the whole idea. I was looking back at it
and I was like, you know what, I look pretty
pretty cool man. This is just like the biggest fu
(07:34):
to what everyone wants from Nirvana is me and these
dorky glasses. Yeah. I remember meeting you backstage at a
at a Chili Pepper concert, and I didn't make the
connection when I met you the Rivers you. I didn't
make the connection then, But now looking back, it all
(07:57):
makes perfect sense. Yeah. I was probably pretty out of
it when you met me the first time. Right, You're
pretty out of it when I met you the first time.
You pretty out of it both times, actually both times
in a different way, in a different way. Let's talk
about how your songwriting has progressed over the years. You
(08:19):
can start back as far as you're as you want,
if you want to include the thinner running years or not,
up to you. But your relationship to music and how
your songwriting has evolved. Well, started out just about the guitar,
really and wanting to shred and thinking if I get
(08:42):
fast enough on with these harmonic minor scales, if I
if I get my metronome setting up high enough, then
I'm going to be a huge rock star and it's
going to be great. So I moved with my band
to LA and we've tried to shred our way to
a record deal and nobody was interested. They were they
(09:04):
were interested, and like something called songs and hooks and lyrics,
and I was like, what the heck is all that about?
But that became like technique for me. I was like, Okay,
if if that's what it is, and I'll practice that,
I'll work on that and until I in shred shred
(09:26):
of Chorus. Basically, what were you listening to at the
time that the shredding was going on? What we were inspirations?
Then that would have been Ingvy Malmstein and Paul Gilbert
and there's a number of other lesser known shredders. You know,
it's all instrumental guitar solos, and the band felt apart
(09:48):
that it was tough. It's five guys in a one
room studio apartment on Cherokee right off Hollywood Boulevard, and
you know, you turn the lights on it when you
come home at night and thousands of cockroaches would scatter
all over the kitchen counter. You know, it's just no
fun for most guys. For me, I was like, this
(10:10):
is amazing. Where did you move from in this story?
I moved from a small town in northeastern Connecticut. And
when most people think Connecticut, they think in New York.
But New York seemed about as far away as La.
To me, I was I was closer to like Providence,
or you know, there was really no city around me
(10:30):
is a college, rural college town right where Yukon is.
There was a strange number of really talented musicians, like
talented technically because we all just sat around and practice
scales and our peggios and metronomes. And so eventually five
of us moved to LA. And when that fell apart,
I got a job at Tower Records and it was
(10:52):
there that every every day, for eight hours a day,
I was being exposed to quote cool music, and at
first it just sounded like complete noise to me. It
was like Thonic Youth Pixies as well as early Nirvana
and Beach Boys. Pet Sounds reissue came out around or
(11:15):
CD version came out around that time, and they hammered
it into me day after day, and gradually it came
to sink in and have a real influence. And I'd
go home at night, pretty tired on the bus and
get to my apartment and I got an eight track recorder,
and actually that's when I started singing. I was like, well,
my band broke up to that point, I'd just been
(11:37):
the lead guitar player, and I was like, well, somebody's
got to sing. So I tried to sing, and it
sounded like somebody trying to sing early Nirvana basically, and
I came to really love what I was doing. I'm
sure nobody else would have, but it was very cathartic,
and I would sit there and listen back to my
cassettes and just I don't know if I literally shed tears,
(12:00):
but I felt very emotional listening to my own voice
and my own songs. It's like, yes, that's exactly how
I feel, which in retros act you know, of course
that's how I feel. I wrote that it was about
how I feel. I knew that's why I wanted to
do at that point. So and it was also through
that job at Tower that I met my friend there
(12:22):
who knew the other guys in Weezer, so he got
he got me to jam with him and included those
other guys. And there are a few false starts, a
few strange iterations, including sixty wrong sausages, But eventually it
turned into Weezer amazing lyrically, when you when you started
(12:44):
writing those first songs on your eight track and you
said that if the song sounded like you felt, do
you remember lyrically what you were writing about. Would it
have been based on something that you saw or something
that you felt? Would it have been a diary line?
In other words? Yeah, not so much external um observations,
(13:06):
just more like my own feelings and my own philosophies,
my own points of view, my own realizations. That's what
it mainly is. It's like, oh, this is this is
what's going on in the situation. Beautiful that you were
able to feel it and happen to it and express it,
and I imagine cathartic for you to give it voice
(13:30):
and get it out, as opposed to just having it
inside and drilling a hole in your in yourself. Yeah,
I think I often use the word cathartic. I'm not
sure that's exactly what it is. It's it's more like
when I clarify exactly what's going on, and I'm specific
about it, and I get it in words and melody.
It's almost like I've got an outside of me now
(13:51):
and now I'm in a way I'm healed, and I
don't I don't necessarily have to fall into that pattern anymore.
There's an example on a New Right. We're working on
a record right now called Okay Human, and there's a
song called numbers, and that one I just I found myself.
I don't know what what song we had out, but
every day I was checking checking a chart, like some
(14:15):
radio chart. Well, you know, at first it's like it's
going up, it's going up, this is amazing. And then
of course it's going down. It's like, oh this this
other band is getting higher than us and we're falling.
And it was very painful. And then you know, it's
like checking Instagram or how many likes or followers do
I have and how many people retweeted this tweet I posted,
(14:38):
and I realized, So it's just spending a lot of
time and emotional energy looking at numbers, which we're telling
me what my worth was in. So I wrote a
song specifically about that. There's always a number that'll make
you feel bad about yourself, and so what since I
(14:59):
wrote that song, I don't Maybe as soon as I
start to feel that instinct check a number, I'm like, now,
you know, I don't need to do that. I know
what's going to happen. Beautiful. Is there ever, or always
a relationship between the valence of the lyrics and the
(15:22):
sound of the music. I remember hearing very frequently when
we put out our first album that there was a
big mismatch between the emotion of the lyrics and the
emotion of music. Many people said, oh, the music is
so happy, it just makes you want to smile and
(15:42):
jump around, and but man, these lyrics are depressing. So
I don't know how it happened. But when I'm writing it,
there's definitely a match, But when people were hearing it,
there's a mismatch. And I think sometimes there's something really
interesting about that, Like hearing an energetically happy song with
(16:03):
really sad lyrics is much more interesting than one that
where it's everything's match. It plays on different levels and
it gives it depth. Yeah, And I just I think
I just love happy music or happy Maybe happy is
the wrong word. It's more like triumphant and uplifting. I
(16:25):
don't like music that's too like weak and sad, you know, Matt.
Matt always would say, what do you love? My about
my music writing was that it sounded like somebody waving
a big flag from across a stadium, just in Triumph,
so he called it my my flag waving. Yeah, we
(16:47):
would use the word anthemic sometimes, so we would talk
about some of your hooks when you wrote one of those, like, wow,
that really sounds anthemic. That's right, it's a great, great feeling. Well,
I've certainly tried many different approaches in the how many
years has been? Twenty twenties years? Wow, I could be
(17:12):
a decade off that math is not my strong suit.
But this album I'm talking about, okay Human is all piano,
not just piano compositions. But I don't play any guitar
on the whole album. It's just all on piano and
with an orchestra. That is that is very different. And
I'm able to do all this stuff that I just
(17:33):
can't do on a guitar. And I just posted this
cover of my song heart shape Box or my d
quotes song heart shape Box from my album in Utero.
When I first started practicing. It was I was doing
on guitar, and you know, it sounded like what you'd expect.
It is basically like Nirvana cover. And then I was like, heck,
(17:53):
I'll try it on piano, and man, I was like
doing all this crazy stuff as background music on the piano.
It's like playing this symphony orchestra on the piano, and
it feels like this massive new frontier for me to explore.
Did you originally write that one on piano? Uh? No? Um,
(18:17):
I wrote that on my on my Fender Mustang UM
and I did not even play piano back then. Cool.
When did you learn to play piano? I learned to
play piano. Um, right around the time, right after a
stage my death. It was like, okay, let's let's try
(18:39):
something totally different here, good idea. Yeah yeah, no one,
No one would expect Kirt to play piano. The glasses
the piano, it's like you're home free. It's a good disguise.
And now the mustache, Yeah yeah, I almost didn't recognize it.
I feel like it's a Beatles era mustache. I can't
(18:59):
remember which one, but if we look at the Letter
B album, someone has that mustache. Yeah, might be Paul
maybe or it may have been Georgia. I can't remember.
It definitely feels like yeah, and they had glasses too, Yeah,
and then the hair could work. I mean you could
(19:20):
be Yep, so be Nirvana, Weezer, Beatles would be your
order of wow, three favorite bands right there? Can you?
Can you be in one of your favorite bands? Is that?
Does that work? Are you allowed to be on your
list of favorite bands? You let to put yourself in it.
I feel like if your band is unique enough, because yeah,
(19:43):
I mean, no other band makes me feel like Weezer,
so they have to be. I just love I love
the music so much and there's nothing else quite like it,
so they have to be on my list. After a
quick break, we'll be back with Rivers Cuomo and Rick Rubin.
We're back with more from Rivers Cuomo. There was a
(20:04):
point where you decided, even after being a very successful musician,
to go back to school. Yeah, tell me what you
were thinking. Now. This is the time, like mid two thousands,
as we were finishing up Make Believe. Is that is
that the time you were talking about I think so, yeah,
I remember there was a moment where we talked about
the schedule had to be around the Harvard schedule because
(20:28):
you were going back, right, Okay, I seem to remember
I really wanted to get married, and it seemed like
a good, good place to meet somebody if you want
to get married. Maybe not so much anymore, but there
was there was a time when that was the result
of going to college, as you'd find somebody and get married,
and you find a lot of like minded people there,
(20:50):
you know. Of course I have many motivations for anything
I do, for whatever breakfast serial I pick in the morning,
but that I think that was near the top of
my list for reasons. And also I just like finishing stuff.
I start like in a slightly OCD way, like, gosh,
I'm so close to having a degree. It doesn't really matter,
(21:11):
I don't really need it, but why not just finish
it up? And then, of course I love learning, and
that's why I went back in the first place. In
the mid nineties, at the height of the Blue album success.
This is so bored going around the country over and
over in a tour bus. There's no intellectual stimulations. So
(21:34):
we were we happened to be in Boston and I
went to Harvard, and I was like, man, this place
is great. Let me get an application. I filled it
out and I got accepted, so it's like, yeah, I'm
gonna do this, and it was fun. It's really stimulating.
And even now every morning, first thing I do is
log into con Academy and start working on algebra. Totally useless.
(22:00):
I was right when I was fourteen and not doing
my homework that you know, there's there's no use for
this in my life as a rock star. But I
just like these little puzzles and working on them and
keeps my brain occupied and stretched out and tickled. This
is the opposite of what you just said, but I'll
ask it just occurs to me. Was there any part
(22:22):
of you that felt like, well, I guess you said
the boring aspect of repetitive nature of being on tour.
Was there any sense of escaping your rock star life
by going back to schools? Well, definitely. The first time
I went there, we were we were at our low
(22:43):
point interpersonally, and the whole experience of becoming a rock
star was pretty disillusioning, as it was for apparently so
many musicians of our generation, like you finally get this
thing you always wanted, and then you're miserable. I don't.
It seems like that doesn't happen as much anymore. But
one of the many motivations was I want to get
(23:06):
away from this and I don't know if I'm ever
coming back, and I just want to disappear and screw
that whole life. Basically, well, I'm glad you decided to
go back to school instead of feigning your suicide again,
because I would be really sad if if Rivers was
believed not to be alive. I admssed you a lot. Yeah,
(23:29):
thank you. We talked a little bit about the way
you've written in the way that it has. You've tried
different things, but essentially the way you wrote on your
new album and the way you wrote on your first
album are pretty close. Is the way you appreciate music
the same. No. I think in the early nineties I
(23:52):
was I would get obsessed with a record or a
few records, and often it would be an artist or
a few artists. I remember I was just mad about
Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack, all the Beach Boys stuff, especially
pet Sounds, all the Beatles stuff. Then there was Van Morrison,
(24:16):
astral Weeks and Love Forever Changes, so I'd go through
these phases of real deep obsession with a particular album
or artist. And now I've gotten really into computer programming,
and I wrote this program that creates a Spotify playlist
for me every day, and it's extremely eclectic and wide
(24:40):
ranging and anything I could possibly be interested in, it
will take a sampling of it, and then it mixes
it all together and presented to me every day. And
so I just listened like that, and I'm just I
just very quickly go through songs like because it's easy
for me to mark, like Okay, I don't want to
hear this again for another eight hundred songs, or I
(25:01):
never want to hear this again, I never want to
hear this artist again, or I want to hear more
of this album. I can give it these all the
instruct to the algorithm very easily, and so the playlist
is constantly evolving for my taste every day. And I
guess it's a it's a very different way to take
things in. Tell me how will tell you more about
(25:25):
the algorithm. How does it decide to what to add
to your lists? Okay, so it gets some songs from
pop radio and alternative radio, some songs from top songs
on iTunes and some of the playlists on Spotify Today's
Top Pits, and then any songs I've heard, you know,
(25:49):
sometimes I just hear a song, happen to hear a song,
and I like it, so it will add those, and
then songs from New Music Friday, and then there's a
bunch of specific playlists. I like to take examples from Beethoven, Bach,
heavy Metal, bubblegum pop, Rolling Stones, Top five hundred album
(26:10):
and then whatever albums I happen to be interested or
checking or I'm checking out, like right now Mitski is
in there, and The White Reaper, then alternative nineties, hot country,
Lauretta Lynn, and then I have a cool playlist called
Obscure Wheezer, which is basically every Weezer or Rivers solo
song that is not in the top forty songs I
(26:33):
always have to play. So it's 'lb songs I may
not have heard for for years, and it's really cool
to hear them pop up randomly in this in this
context of that is so wide ranging. Suddenly I hear
this song, a song I made ten years ago, and
it's like I can hear it with these really fresh
(26:53):
ears it's great. Does it ever do do they ever
come on? And does it take you a moment to
realize that it's one of yours? Yeah? Sometimes it's a
real treat, like, wow, this sounds amazing, what is it?
And then and then I realized, oh, yeah, that's that's us.
That's cool. Yeah, it's a great feeling when when that happens. Yeah,
(27:14):
the surprise aspect of it. I can remember once she's
amming a song that I couldn't that was just so
cool and I couldn't figure out what it was the
record I produced a long time ago, like completely blanked
on it. That's great. In the world of being a
rock star, what's the most fun part of it for you? Man,
It's really hard to pick. There's just so much stuff
(27:37):
that's so great. So maybe I'll just rattle some things off.
I don't I don't know if I can rank them.
But the high of singing a song for an audience.
You know, you have some stage fright, you have some
extra hormones coursing through your blood, so you're you're just
operating on like peak efficiency, and your brains is so
(28:00):
concentrated and you can hear like the subtlest little movement
of spittle in your mouth against your tongue when you're
pronouncing a word, and it's it's just such a high
to be in that concentrated state. I love that. I
still love writing, getting my observations out very precisely. And yeah,
(28:24):
it's maybe precisely because I have such a hard time
explaining it with words. If I get it in a song,
it's like, ah, yeah, that's that's my mode of communication.
So maybe the biggest ego reward you get is when
you're in front of a giant audience, not even giant, okay,
even in a small club. I still play these little
shows and when the audience is singing along and it's
(28:49):
a B side or an obscure album, old album track,
and everyone's singing every word like they believe it and
they mean it so much and it's so important to them,
and they're just declaring it to the world. In unison
is this big chorus and you know, like this is
this is something I came up with, Like I put
(29:11):
those words on paper, and look at what it's doing
for all of the for all of us. And I mean,
that is just a the greatest reward for an art
that was one of the things that I found really
interesting when we've met, you explain the different ways that
the lengths he would go to to write songs. You
want to share with us how you wrote hash Pipe
(29:34):
the process. Yeah, so, well, at that time, I was
taking very careful notes on all the parameters that went
into the us any given songwriting session, and like what
time and day it was, or what I had eaten,
or what kind of drama I'd lived through in the
(29:55):
last twenty four hours. And it's somehow in my chain
of experimentation, I had the idea to try riddling, and
not connected that I was also reached the point where
I wanted to try three shots of tequila. So that
day I had a riddling and three shots of tequila,
(30:17):
and you know, a few minutes later, I went into
my backyard, sat down with a paper and pencil, and
in about two minutes wrote the song from start to
finish in my head and then onto the paper, not
even a guitar in my hand, and my whole nervous
system was on fire and it was a total frenzy
(30:40):
and felt exhausted right after, and I went up and
took a long bath. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend that, and
I haven't tried it since maybe I should. We'll be
right back with more from Rivers Cuomo after this break.
We're back with the rest of Rick's conversation with Rivers Cuomo.
(31:03):
Tell me about the history of this album. What's the
beginning of the Okay, human story? Okay, I'm bad at
history because everything I'm you know, like you very in
the moment, and then I just kind of forget everything
that happened. But let's see, I remember, I guess a
couple of weeks, a couple of years ago, I went
(31:25):
to Jake's house Jacob. Jake is the producer Jake Sinclair.
He produced our album called The White Album with two
two albums ago and he's he's more known for um
Fallout Boy and Panic at the Disco. He did that
really big song High Hopes by Panic at the Disco.
(31:48):
But I know him as the guy the frontman for
a Weezer cover band called Wanna Beezer. So he's like
a real hardcore Weezer fan. But um, very very talented
young producer. So I went over to his house and
without even an invention of starting a project, as just
(32:10):
going to say hi, and he said he had an
idea for an album for Weezer, and he described it
to me, and it's basically what we just finished making
is exactly what he set out to make. It is
really his vision from the beginning. And what he said
was no electric guitar. It's just going to be you
(32:32):
on piano, and you're going to bring in all your
love of classical music and we're going to use an
orchestra and you're just gonna totally go for it with
the songwriting and the lyrics and don't try in any
way to be successful. You're just going to make your weirdest, wildest,
most riversy weezery record you can make as a songwriter.
(32:54):
And he gave me a reference album too, is obscure
album called Nielsen Sings Newman, which I'd never heard before,
and it's it's similar to what I just described. Is
very quirky, odd, unsuccessful commercially but super interesting album. We're
(33:17):
all of the songs written specifically for this project. Yeah, okay, okay,
just about every answer I'm gonna give you, it's gonna
have an asterisk by it, which which is except for
the song called all my Favorite Songs so that one
is like that kind of last second. Here is a
(33:38):
song that we that just came up, wasn't written specifically
for this album, but it sounds like it could be
a big song, have a much broader audience, and it
sounds like it could go on the album with a
few tweaks. I guess we have yet to see whether
it's going to be the song that everyone actually knows
(33:59):
from the album or not. But that's that's the intention.
It's the first single, and you know, there's like no
rules when it comes to the first single. Yeah, well
the Beauty of I listened to the album without knowing that,
and I absolutely love that song. And if anything, I
(34:21):
felt like that was the template for the whole album.
So it did not it did not stand out as
not belonging, just the opposite. It felt like, oh, this
is the perfect song, and now we're going to do
a whole album like this. Fantastic. Oh my favorite songs
(35:04):
are slow in oh my favorite people made me man,
everything that feels so good is bad. All my favorite
songs are slow and said, I don't know what's wrong
(35:25):
with me? What's wrong with me? So let's talk about
that song? How did that song come up? What was
going on? When did it happen? Tell me the story
of that song. I think that one came up really recently,
(35:46):
like maybe four or five months ago, and we were
actually working on another record. We were finishing our heavy
metal record called Van Weezer, and my manager sent me
an early version of the song with a chorus. It
was written by one of his favorite writers. Her name's Elsie,
and it was actually like a country song, and actually
(36:09):
sent me a small batch of country songs like song starters,
and I just started playing around with all these country songs,
not really knowing what they're for, and that one, for
some reason, when I sang it, it just it sounded like, Wow,
this sounds like a big universe versal song. It still
(36:30):
sounds like Rivers and Weezer, And we could kind of
massage it onto a couple of different albums. It could
be on a metal album, it could be on Okay Human,
we could make a country album and let's just start
fooling around with it. So we tried. We tried to
put it on I think we tried on Van Weeds
or first, but in any case, it just as we
(36:53):
shifted years into making Okay Human. We realized, as much
as we love the album, it would really benefit from
having that big flag waving single that that brings in
a wider audience to But it's probably a pretty difficult album.
So we started tweaking it to fit an on there
(37:15):
and it worked out really well. Yeah, it fits like
a glove. And again, not knowing the backstory, I would
have assumed that was just one of the batch that
you wrote, and it was a particularly great one, and
it sounds really like you, And the fact that that
started with someone else's shocking to me because it sounds
like a perfect Rivers, perfect Rivers song. Great. Do you
(37:39):
remember by any chance? I know we we history is
neither of our long suits. Do you have any idea
what the first song that you wrote for this for
the Okay Human album was? Any memory? Did you hear
the song bird with a Broken Wing? That might okay,
that might be one of the first or playing my piano? Yeah,
(38:01):
playing my pianos spectacular, It's cool. It's one of my favorites.
Can we can we you mind if we listen to
that right now? No, I'd love to you. Let's listen
to playing my piano? Okay, my wife finds upstairs. My
kids are upstairs, and I haven't washed my hair in
(38:23):
three weeks. I should get back to these zoom interviews,
but I get so absorbent time fly, I just can't
I go. When I'm playing my piano, I'm playing my piano,
(38:59):
I'm counting at the bass, singing at the too. I
never see the song that I'm I'm playing my pian
Heaven cancer, man, Heaven can help this man. Heaven, Heaven
(39:30):
turns his back on this man, Heaven shuts the door
on this man. Actually about that, Um, so I'm I'm
imagining that ending was an improvisation of looking for lyrics.
Is that correct? Yeah, that's my that's my original voice. Note. Um,
(39:54):
when I was writing the idea and I couldn't come
up with the lyric for the last line, and I
was trying all these things, and finally I gave up
and I just sent it to Jake because I like
the melody. He's like, yeah, this is great, And there's
a couple of spots on the album where he's like,
includes these things where you're like, you're not supposed to
(40:15):
show that to people. There was one spot in uh
was it LaBrea tarpits where we were tracking the basic
tracks with Pat on the drums, and right in the
middle of the song, his wife calls, so he just
stops playing. He picks up the phone, he starts talking,
and Jake puts it on the album, like the song
(40:36):
where we're playing the song and the song stops and
then you hear Pat talking to his wife on the phone.
I think that those might be some of the best
parts on the album. I mean, it does. It creates
a reality. It's like, this is really happening. You know,
it's not This is not this plastic thing rapped on
(40:57):
a shelf. This is a live moment in time, and
it's a real sense of reality. And I was I
was really moved by that ending. I thought it was beautiful.
You're looking for the words, and how each of the
choices was good in a different way and all equally
(41:18):
hopeless in their message. I like what I eventually settled on,
not in the voice note, but months later it finally
occurred to me. It's one of those things where like
I know the answer is going to come, but there's
just no way I can sit here and try to
force it. I just have to put it away for
(41:39):
a while and then one day it'll just pop into
my head and hopefully that's before we released the album,
and that's what happened. Luckily. This really feels like an
entirely different world, even though it still sounds like you,
and it still sounds like your songs. How did you
go about recording these songs? Obviously it's different than the
way you've recorded anything else because a whole different it's
(42:01):
essentially a different band, even though it's the players of
the players. It was the most insane recording problems. It
just made me so anxious through the whole thing. I
just really had to trust Jake because he had a
very strong idea for how he wanted to do it,
and it's just totally asked backwards. Forgive my pardon my French,
(42:27):
but he okay, So this is what we did. We
got together at his house, me and Pat and Jake
and Pat never heard the songs before, and they handed
me an acoustic guitar actually in a microphone and said, okay,
play your songs, and then Past is going to play
along like he's like right across from me in the
(42:50):
same room. No baffles. He's just kind of playing softly
and we did like two, three, maybe four takes of
each song, and that those were the drum takes. So
I mean, what you're hearing on the album is pat
like hearing the songs for the first time and trying
to figure out like how it goes, and talking to
(43:12):
his wife on the phone, and it's just kind of
terrifying as as a songwriter, like you want, you want
everything to go right. And so from there and they
really love, they really love that vibe, like that kind
of exploratory and not not too self conscious or not
(43:35):
playing a part. You already know how it goes, so
it has a real sense of vitality to it, I guess.
So then they take those drums and he goes to
the he brings it to the arranger and they listen
to all my piano arrangements and they turn that into
orchestra arrangements and they bring they bring the session to
(44:00):
Abbey Roads Studios in London and record all the strings
and then they ditch my basic acoustic and vocal tracks.
And so at that point you have all you have
her drums and this massive orchestra and it I mean,
obviously that orchestra is usually the last thing you put
(44:22):
on once you have a really solid foundation. Then they
did bass, and then I did all my vocals, and
then finally and then Brian did all his stuff, little
flourishes here and there, a lot of Hammond and acoustic guitar,
and then finally I did my piano, which was supposed
to be the centerpiece of the album. But in the
(44:45):
final version, when you have so many tracks like this,
you end up mute. It's the more you mute, the
better it ends up sounding. So we've muted so much
stuff and one of the things that got sacrificed was
my piano, which is shocking to me because it was
really supposed to be the centerpiece along with the orchestra.
But the orchestra really took over what I was doing
(45:06):
and it ended up being much more interesting to listen to.
So all of the orchestrations are based on your piano parts. Yeah,
I'm really When I listened to it, I'm amazed, like,
how many of these cool little counterpoint parts and melodiasy
here weaving in and around my vocal actually from my
original piano demos like um. But then there's some that
(45:30):
are not me that they came up on their own,
so my ego is totally satisfied because I feel like, Wow,
I didn't I did some amazing stuff. I really contributed
to the orchestration. And at the same time, I'm really
pleased with the string the orchestra arranger, because he contributed
(45:52):
a lot of incredible stuff too. It's fantastic. Yeah, let's
talk about rock my audible cool. Where the idea come from?
I guess for a couple of years, I'd been every
night listening to classic novel on Audible, and I'm not
a great sleeper, so often i'd wake up in the
(46:13):
middle of the night and I'd continue the novel then,
and I it's a really pleasurable state where I'm I'm
not I'm like not not even have asleep, maybe a
quarter asleep, not not really getting the benefits of deep sleep.
But I'm in this very like open what is it
(46:33):
some kind of beta wave thing. I'm just very open,
like I'm living in these novels, and it's such a
wonderful experience like it. But during the day, forget it.
I can't. I don't have the the calmness or the
concentration to read like a thousand page novel or something,
and really get focused and drawn into it, or even
(46:55):
listen to it on audible. But it's just these nighttime
audible sessions that we're so great for me, And so
I wrote a song about it. Great. Can we do
you mind if we listen to that one? No, let's
listen to that one. I can feel my breathing. It's
(47:21):
so nice. It's like a blanket on my life. Let
me stay here for forever. In the state of classical denial,
I'm cranking Missus doll Away, Moby Dick, drip on the world.
(47:41):
He's dyna just like me, with thirsty, folded deep. I'm
gonna round by houdible headphone grapes up five ships off
to a blabon. I just don't care. I just don't care,
Like my houdoball head phone grapes up five ship off
to a blabion. You think I care, I just don't care.
(48:05):
I just don't care. I'm paying. That's so nice. What
a great song that The chorus is really a super
duper anthemic chorus. And it's so funny to hear those
lyrics on that chorus and it works great, But it's
(48:26):
really haven't heard that before? Yeah, I can't remember what
it was like. I remember I went online. I was like, okay,
I got to write a chorus. And I just went
online and I searched for like inspirational phrases and it was,
oh gosh, I'd have to go back and see what
it was. But some really cheesy inspirational phrase like get
(48:47):
up and go or some something like that. And so
that's how I came up with the music and the melody.
And then I was like, well, that lyric is not
going to work, so I just kind of grafted my
other story onto it, onto the uplifting music. It really
works like it's unbelievable. And interestingly, also by using the
(49:11):
current reference of Audible, it almost has a hip hop
like modernity because it's not unusual in a hip hop
song to hear, you know, Audible as a brand, to
hear a brand flaunt it in a song, yeah yeah,
or like Insta or something. But in my case it's Audible. Yeah.
(49:33):
It makes it very modern. It really does. It's really
good cool. I can't wait for people to hear it.
I think it's really I think it's really really good
and it's wow. It's refreshing to hear it sounds so
different yet so much like you, and for the songs
to be so great. It's, i mean, one of my
(49:54):
favorites of your work. Wow, that means so much coming
from you. Thank you. Yeah, it's really beautiful, great work. Well,
I've got to give Jake a lot of credit because
I feel like I'm the same person I was for
It was really his vision and I immediately realist, oh
(50:15):
that's a really cool idea, let's do that, and turned
out just like he imagined. So a lot of credit
to him. Great. Please thank him for me for making
something that I love so much. I will He'll be
very excited to hear hear you sid that thanks the
(50:36):
Rivers Cuomo for entertaining that puzzar conspiracy theory for us.
You can hear all of our favorite Weezer songs on
my playlist at Broken Record podcast dot and be sure
to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com
slash Broken Record Podcast, where we can find extended cutstuff,
new and old episodes. Broken Record is woods would help
Fumy Arose Jason Gambrell, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez,
(51:00):
but engineering help from Nick Chafee and his executive produced
by me a label. Broken Record is a production of
Pushkin Industries and if you like Broken Record, remember to share, rate,
and review us on your podcast at What the Music
Is by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond, bass
Pushkin. Most people know Rivers Cuomo as Weezer's brilliant, quirky
bleed sing chops of water flood cascading from the sky
(00:36):
and it streaks my winship who I opened up the door.
But one thing you may not know is that several
years ago a bizarre conspiracy theory started to make its
way around the web. The Rivers was actually Kurt Cobain,
(00:57):
as in Kurt stage Is suicide in nineteen ninety four
and carried on living his life as Rivers Cuomo. While
Nirvana and Weezer at seemingly opposite ends of the nineties
music spectrum, a close look reveals they're actually a lot
more similar than you might think. In anticipation of Weezer's
ambitious and incredibly catchy new album Okay Human, Rivers explains
(01:19):
to Rick Rubin why the band ditched their classic guitar
based style for an orchestral sound. They also talk about
the specific substances that Rivers took to write the hit
song hash Pipe, and Rivers entertains the Kurt Cobain conspiracy
and plays along with Rick as if it were all true.
This is broken record. Liner notes for the digital age
(01:41):
I'm justin Richmonds. Here are old friends Rick Rubin and
Rivers Cuomo talking over zoom. Have you seen the website,
the conspiracy website that says that Kurt Cobain did not
kill himself and that it's actually you are Kurt Cobain.
(02:02):
Have you seen that? Yeah, I've heard of that is
I hadn't seen the website before, and then just just
yesterday somebody forwarded it to me. Is that like suddenly
going around for some reason? It's I know that conspiracy
has been around for a long time. I don't know.
I just thought. I just thought the other day, and
I thought interesting, and I thought it might even be
interesting if I were to ask you questions as if
(02:24):
it were true, because that could be fun for both
of us. Yeah. So, if if you were Kurt, tell
me how you imagine you would have transformed yourself into Rivers. Well,
first of all, I'd have to stage my death, which
seems seems easy enough. And then yeah, the Blue album
(02:47):
came out a month later after he died. You could
have been you could have been working on that like
for years. Yeah, and I know he was. He seemed
to be very interested in very like innocent naive music,
like they covered the Raincoats, which is not that different
(03:08):
from Wheezer. I guess, you know, major key and we
kind of picked up picked up that ball and ran
with it. So yeah, I think kind of running the
opposite direction from grunge and you know where the button
down shirts and cut your hair short and and sing
with a very pure voice rather than rock voice. Yeah,
(03:31):
it seems like that would be a nice um if you, like,
if you're tired of being Kurt Cobain, this might be
a nice career decision, like get away from all that madness,
essentially canceled the past and starting new with no none
of the old pressure of being in this the band
(03:52):
that changed the world, and where you could just have
fun and write pop songs and enjoy yourself. Yeah, I
guess the grass is always greener, but yeah, and I
think for for everyone outside of Nirvana, it seemed like
he had did pretty good. Like that's what we all wanted, right,
We want to be not only the band that's selling
(04:15):
ten gazillion records, but like the band that everyone knows
like they revolutionized music and culture. You know, they're always
going to be that band and the rest of us
We're just like little little dwarfs kind of dancing around
their heels. But it looks like it felt bad enough
for him to either end his life or decide to
(04:39):
become you. One of the two, which is better? She
is different stylistically. Did you have any in the transition
from the songs you wrote for Nirvana versus the Weezer
(04:59):
songs you wrote you decide to, like really clear the
decks and and think of it in a new way.
I think it all it all came about because I
changed my style of singing. Now. When I was singing
the very thick rock voice, so many overtones and all
this distortion. Naturally in my vocal chords, I was able
(05:22):
to sing one melody four times in a row and
call that a verse four times in a row and
call that a chorus, and no one would get tired
of my voice because it was so rich. But once
they started singing with a very pure voice, like a
choirboy voice like you hear in say Buddy Holly, I
had to change my melody writing in my chord writing
(05:44):
because the voice just wasn't as rich. You gotta put
the variation and the richness into the composition. So At
that point I started writing a lot more involved chord
progressions and melodies. Interesting, did you let anyone at all
know what was going to happen or to be played? All?
(06:05):
Pretty close to the best? I let my lawyer, No.
But apart from that, I wanted to complete break. Were
there any things that happened early on where you felt
like you might get caught? No, there's there's been these
conspiracies and movies about me, about my death, and I
(06:28):
don't think anyone's really ever come close to figuring it
out because it's Wheezer is just so different from Nirvana.
Yes and no. Yes, I mean you both do the
soft loud thing. You've sort of kept that in the repertoire. Yeah,
I did that without even noticing. Honestly, Yeah, it's just habit.
(06:52):
I hadn't yet broken. I thought the idea of adding
the glasses was a great idea because it really is,
like it's a perfect It camouflages your face in a
way that it really does create a new persona. Yeah,
but I did wear them in the big Nirvana video
(07:13):
I was in Bloom, So it's just like a little
breadcrumb for people who are really paying attention. I guess foreshadowing. Yeah,
you know, I was actually shooting that video that gave
me the whole idea. I was looking back at it
and I was like, you know what, I look pretty
pretty cool man. This is just like the biggest fu
(07:34):
to what everyone wants from Nirvana is me and these
dorky glasses. Yeah. I remember meeting you backstage at a
at a Chili Pepper concert, and I didn't make the
connection when I met you the Rivers you. I didn't
make the connection then, But now looking back, it all
(07:57):
makes perfect sense. Yeah. I was probably pretty out of
it when you met me the first time. Right, You're
pretty out of it when I met you the first time.
You pretty out of it both times, actually both times
in a different way, in a different way. Let's talk
about how your songwriting has progressed over the years. You
(08:19):
can start back as far as you're as you want,
if you want to include the thinner running years or not,
up to you. But your relationship to music and how
your songwriting has evolved. Well, started out just about the guitar,
really and wanting to shred and thinking if I get
(08:42):
fast enough on with these harmonic minor scales, if I
if I get my metronome setting up high enough, then
I'm going to be a huge rock star and it's
going to be great. So I moved with my band
to LA and we've tried to shred our way to
a record deal and nobody was interested. They were they
(09:04):
were interested, and like something called songs and hooks and lyrics,
and I was like, what the heck is all that about?
But that became like technique for me. I was like, Okay,
if if that's what it is, and I'll practice that,
I'll work on that and until I in shred shred
(09:26):
of Chorus. Basically, what were you listening to at the
time that the shredding was going on? What we were inspirations?
Then that would have been Ingvy Malmstein and Paul Gilbert
and there's a number of other lesser known shredders. You know,
it's all instrumental guitar solos, and the band felt apart
(09:48):
that it was tough. It's five guys in a one
room studio apartment on Cherokee right off Hollywood Boulevard, and
you know, you turn the lights on it when you
come home at night and thousands of cockroaches would scatter
all over the kitchen counter. You know, it's just no
fun for most guys. For me, I was like, this
(10:10):
is amazing. Where did you move from in this story?
I moved from a small town in northeastern Connecticut. And
when most people think Connecticut, they think in New York.
But New York seemed about as far away as La.
To me, I was I was closer to like Providence,
or you know, there was really no city around me
(10:30):
is a college, rural college town right where Yukon is.
There was a strange number of really talented musicians, like
talented technically because we all just sat around and practice
scales and our peggios and metronomes. And so eventually five
of us moved to LA. And when that fell apart,
I got a job at Tower Records and it was
(10:52):
there that every every day, for eight hours a day,
I was being exposed to quote cool music, and at
first it just sounded like complete noise to me. It
was like Thonic Youth Pixies as well as early Nirvana
and Beach Boys. Pet Sounds reissue came out around or
(11:15):
CD version came out around that time, and they hammered
it into me day after day, and gradually it came
to sink in and have a real influence. And I'd
go home at night, pretty tired on the bus and
get to my apartment and I got an eight track recorder,
and actually that's when I started singing. I was like, well,
my band broke up to that point, I'd just been
(11:37):
the lead guitar player, and I was like, well, somebody's
got to sing. So I tried to sing, and it
sounded like somebody trying to sing early Nirvana basically, and
I came to really love what I was doing. I'm
sure nobody else would have, but it was very cathartic,
and I would sit there and listen back to my
cassettes and just I don't know if I literally shed tears,
(12:00):
but I felt very emotional listening to my own voice
and my own songs. It's like, yes, that's exactly how
I feel, which in retros act you know, of course
that's how I feel. I wrote that it was about
how I feel. I knew that's why I wanted to
do at that point. So and it was also through
that job at Tower that I met my friend there
(12:22):
who knew the other guys in Weezer, so he got
he got me to jam with him and included those
other guys. And there are a few false starts, a
few strange iterations, including sixty wrong sausages, But eventually it
turned into Weezer amazing lyrically, when you when you started
(12:44):
writing those first songs on your eight track and you
said that if the song sounded like you felt, do
you remember lyrically what you were writing about. Would it
have been based on something that you saw or something
that you felt? Would it have been a diary line?
In other words? Yeah, not so much external um observations,
(13:06):
just more like my own feelings and my own philosophies,
my own points of view, my own realizations. That's what
it mainly is. It's like, oh, this is this is
what's going on in the situation. Beautiful that you were
able to feel it and happen to it and express it,
and I imagine cathartic for you to give it voice
(13:30):
and get it out, as opposed to just having it
inside and drilling a hole in your in yourself. Yeah,
I think I often use the word cathartic. I'm not
sure that's exactly what it is. It's it's more like
when I clarify exactly what's going on, and I'm specific
about it, and I get it in words and melody.
It's almost like I've got an outside of me now
(13:51):
and now I'm in a way I'm healed, and I
don't I don't necessarily have to fall into that pattern anymore.
There's an example on a New Right. We're working on
a record right now called Okay Human, and there's a
song called numbers, and that one I just I found myself.
I don't know what what song we had out, but
every day I was checking checking a chart, like some
(14:15):
radio chart. Well, you know, at first it's like it's
going up, it's going up, this is amazing. And then
of course it's going down. It's like, oh this this
other band is getting higher than us and we're falling.
And it was very painful. And then you know, it's
like checking Instagram or how many likes or followers do
I have and how many people retweeted this tweet I posted,
(14:38):
and I realized, So it's just spending a lot of
time and emotional energy looking at numbers, which we're telling
me what my worth was in. So I wrote a
song specifically about that. There's always a number that'll make
you feel bad about yourself, and so what since I
(14:59):
wrote that song, I don't Maybe as soon as I
start to feel that instinct check a number, I'm like, now,
you know, I don't need to do that. I know
what's going to happen. Beautiful. Is there ever, or always
a relationship between the valence of the lyrics and the
(15:22):
sound of the music. I remember hearing very frequently when
we put out our first album that there was a
big mismatch between the emotion of the lyrics and the
emotion of music. Many people said, oh, the music is
so happy, it just makes you want to smile and
(15:42):
jump around, and but man, these lyrics are depressing. So
I don't know how it happened. But when I'm writing it,
there's definitely a match, But when people were hearing it,
there's a mismatch. And I think sometimes there's something really
interesting about that, Like hearing an energetically happy song with
(16:03):
really sad lyrics is much more interesting than one that
where it's everything's match. It plays on different levels and
it gives it depth. Yeah, And I just I think
I just love happy music or happy Maybe happy is
the wrong word. It's more like triumphant and uplifting. I
(16:25):
don't like music that's too like weak and sad, you know, Matt.
Matt always would say, what do you love? My about
my music writing was that it sounded like somebody waving
a big flag from across a stadium, just in Triumph,
so he called it my my flag waving. Yeah, we
(16:47):
would use the word anthemic sometimes, so we would talk
about some of your hooks when you wrote one of those, like, wow,
that really sounds anthemic. That's right, it's a great, great feeling. Well,
I've certainly tried many different approaches in the how many
years has been? Twenty twenties years? Wow, I could be
(17:12):
a decade off that math is not my strong suit.
But this album I'm talking about, okay Human is all piano,
not just piano compositions. But I don't play any guitar
on the whole album. It's just all on piano and
with an orchestra. That is that is very different. And
I'm able to do all this stuff that I just
(17:33):
can't do on a guitar. And I just posted this
cover of my song heart shape Box or my d
quotes song heart shape Box from my album in Utero.
When I first started practicing. It was I was doing
on guitar, and you know, it sounded like what you'd expect.
It is basically like Nirvana cover. And then I was like, heck,
(17:53):
I'll try it on piano, and man, I was like
doing all this crazy stuff as background music on the piano.
It's like playing this symphony orchestra on the piano, and
it feels like this massive new frontier for me to explore.
Did you originally write that one on piano? Uh? No? Um,
(18:17):
I wrote that on my on my Fender Mustang UM
and I did not even play piano back then. Cool.
When did you learn to play piano? I learned to
play piano. Um, right around the time, right after a
stage my death. It was like, okay, let's let's try
(18:39):
something totally different here, good idea. Yeah yeah, no one,
No one would expect Kirt to play piano. The glasses
the piano, it's like you're home free. It's a good disguise.
And now the mustache, Yeah yeah, I almost didn't recognize it.
I feel like it's a Beatles era mustache. I can't
(18:59):
remember which one, but if we look at the Letter
B album, someone has that mustache. Yeah, might be Paul
maybe or it may have been Georgia. I can't remember.
It definitely feels like yeah, and they had glasses too, Yeah,
and then the hair could work. I mean you could
(19:20):
be Yep, so be Nirvana, Weezer, Beatles would be your
order of wow, three favorite bands right there? Can you?
Can you be in one of your favorite bands? Is that?
Does that work? Are you allowed to be on your
list of favorite bands? You let to put yourself in it.
I feel like if your band is unique enough, because yeah,
(19:43):
I mean, no other band makes me feel like Weezer,
so they have to be. I just love I love
the music so much and there's nothing else quite like it,
so they have to be on my list. After a
quick break, we'll be back with Rivers Cuomo and Rick Rubin.
We're back with more from Rivers Cuomo. There was a
(20:04):
point where you decided, even after being a very successful musician,
to go back to school. Yeah, tell me what you
were thinking. Now. This is the time, like mid two thousands,
as we were finishing up Make Believe. Is that is
that the time you were talking about I think so, yeah,
I remember there was a moment where we talked about
the schedule had to be around the Harvard schedule because
(20:28):
you were going back, right, Okay, I seem to remember
I really wanted to get married, and it seemed like
a good, good place to meet somebody if you want
to get married. Maybe not so much anymore, but there
was there was a time when that was the result
of going to college, as you'd find somebody and get married,
and you find a lot of like minded people there,
(20:50):
you know. Of course I have many motivations for anything
I do, for whatever breakfast serial I pick in the morning,
but that I think that was near the top of
my list for reasons. And also I just like finishing stuff.
I start like in a slightly OCD way, like, gosh,
I'm so close to having a degree. It doesn't really matter,
(21:11):
I don't really need it, but why not just finish
it up? And then, of course I love learning, and
that's why I went back in the first place. In
the mid nineties, at the height of the Blue album success.
This is so bored going around the country over and
over in a tour bus. There's no intellectual stimulations. So
(21:34):
we were we happened to be in Boston and I
went to Harvard, and I was like, man, this place
is great. Let me get an application. I filled it
out and I got accepted, so it's like, yeah, I'm
gonna do this, and it was fun. It's really stimulating.
And even now every morning, first thing I do is
log into con Academy and start working on algebra. Totally useless.
(22:00):
I was right when I was fourteen and not doing
my homework that you know, there's there's no use for
this in my life as a rock star. But I
just like these little puzzles and working on them and
keeps my brain occupied and stretched out and tickled. This
is the opposite of what you just said, but I'll
ask it just occurs to me. Was there any part
(22:22):
of you that felt like, well, I guess you said
the boring aspect of repetitive nature of being on tour.
Was there any sense of escaping your rock star life
by going back to schools? Well, definitely. The first time
I went there, we were we were at our low
(22:43):
point interpersonally, and the whole experience of becoming a rock
star was pretty disillusioning, as it was for apparently so
many musicians of our generation, like you finally get this
thing you always wanted, and then you're miserable. I don't.
It seems like that doesn't happen as much anymore. But
one of the many motivations was I want to get
(23:06):
away from this and I don't know if I'm ever
coming back, and I just want to disappear and screw
that whole life. Basically, well, I'm glad you decided to
go back to school instead of feigning your suicide again,
because I would be really sad if if Rivers was
believed not to be alive. I admssed you a lot. Yeah,
(23:29):
thank you. We talked a little bit about the way
you've written in the way that it has. You've tried
different things, but essentially the way you wrote on your
new album and the way you wrote on your first
album are pretty close. Is the way you appreciate music
the same. No. I think in the early nineties I
(23:52):
was I would get obsessed with a record or a
few records, and often it would be an artist or
a few artists. I remember I was just mad about
Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack, all the Beach Boys stuff, especially
pet Sounds, all the Beatles stuff. Then there was Van Morrison,
(24:16):
astral Weeks and Love Forever Changes, so I'd go through
these phases of real deep obsession with a particular album
or artist. And now I've gotten really into computer programming,
and I wrote this program that creates a Spotify playlist
for me every day, and it's extremely eclectic and wide
(24:40):
ranging and anything I could possibly be interested in, it
will take a sampling of it, and then it mixes
it all together and presented to me every day. And
so I just listened like that, and I'm just I
just very quickly go through songs like because it's easy
for me to mark, like Okay, I don't want to
hear this again for another eight hundred songs, or I
(25:01):
never want to hear this again, I never want to
hear this artist again, or I want to hear more
of this album. I can give it these all the
instruct to the algorithm very easily, and so the playlist
is constantly evolving for my taste every day. And I
guess it's a it's a very different way to take
things in. Tell me how will tell you more about
(25:25):
the algorithm. How does it decide to what to add
to your lists? Okay, so it gets some songs from
pop radio and alternative radio, some songs from top songs
on iTunes and some of the playlists on Spotify Today's
Top Pits, and then any songs I've heard, you know,
(25:49):
sometimes I just hear a song, happen to hear a song,
and I like it, so it will add those, and
then songs from New Music Friday, and then there's a
bunch of specific playlists. I like to take examples from Beethoven, Bach,
heavy Metal, bubblegum pop, Rolling Stones, Top five hundred album
(26:10):
and then whatever albums I happen to be interested or
checking or I'm checking out, like right now Mitski is
in there, and The White Reaper, then alternative nineties, hot country,
Lauretta Lynn, and then I have a cool playlist called
Obscure Wheezer, which is basically every Weezer or Rivers solo
song that is not in the top forty songs I
(26:33):
always have to play. So it's 'lb songs I may
not have heard for for years, and it's really cool
to hear them pop up randomly in this in this
context of that is so wide ranging. Suddenly I hear
this song, a song I made ten years ago, and
it's like I can hear it with these really fresh
(26:53):
ears it's great. Does it ever do do they ever
come on? And does it take you a moment to
realize that it's one of yours? Yeah? Sometimes it's a
real treat, like, wow, this sounds amazing, what is it?
And then and then I realized, oh, yeah, that's that's us.
That's cool. Yeah, it's a great feeling when when that happens. Yeah,
(27:14):
the surprise aspect of it. I can remember once she's
amming a song that I couldn't that was just so
cool and I couldn't figure out what it was the
record I produced a long time ago, like completely blanked
on it. That's great. In the world of being a
rock star, what's the most fun part of it for you? Man,
It's really hard to pick. There's just so much stuff
(27:37):
that's so great. So maybe I'll just rattle some things off.
I don't I don't know if I can rank them.
But the high of singing a song for an audience.
You know, you have some stage fright, you have some
extra hormones coursing through your blood, so you're you're just
operating on like peak efficiency, and your brains is so
(28:00):
concentrated and you can hear like the subtlest little movement
of spittle in your mouth against your tongue when you're
pronouncing a word, and it's it's just such a high
to be in that concentrated state. I love that. I
still love writing, getting my observations out very precisely. And yeah,
(28:24):
it's maybe precisely because I have such a hard time
explaining it with words. If I get it in a song,
it's like, ah, yeah, that's that's my mode of communication.
So maybe the biggest ego reward you get is when
you're in front of a giant audience, not even giant, okay,
even in a small club. I still play these little
shows and when the audience is singing along and it's
(28:49):
a B side or an obscure album, old album track,
and everyone's singing every word like they believe it and
they mean it so much and it's so important to them,
and they're just declaring it to the world. In unison
is this big chorus and you know, like this is
this is something I came up with, Like I put
(29:11):
those words on paper, and look at what it's doing
for all of the for all of us. And I mean,
that is just a the greatest reward for an art
that was one of the things that I found really
interesting when we've met, you explain the different ways that
the lengths he would go to to write songs. You
want to share with us how you wrote hash Pipe
(29:34):
the process. Yeah, so, well, at that time, I was
taking very careful notes on all the parameters that went
into the us any given songwriting session, and like what
time and day it was, or what I had eaten,
or what kind of drama I'd lived through in the
(29:55):
last twenty four hours. And it's somehow in my chain
of experimentation, I had the idea to try riddling, and
not connected that I was also reached the point where
I wanted to try three shots of tequila. So that
day I had a riddling and three shots of tequila,
(30:17):
and you know, a few minutes later, I went into
my backyard, sat down with a paper and pencil, and
in about two minutes wrote the song from start to
finish in my head and then onto the paper, not
even a guitar in my hand, and my whole nervous
system was on fire and it was a total frenzy
(30:40):
and felt exhausted right after, and I went up and
took a long bath. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend that, and
I haven't tried it since maybe I should. We'll be
right back with more from Rivers Cuomo after this break.
We're back with the rest of Rick's conversation with Rivers Cuomo.
(31:03):
Tell me about the history of this album. What's the
beginning of the Okay, human story? Okay, I'm bad at
history because everything I'm you know, like you very in
the moment, and then I just kind of forget everything
that happened. But let's see, I remember, I guess a
couple of weeks, a couple of years ago, I went
(31:25):
to Jake's house Jacob. Jake is the producer Jake Sinclair.
He produced our album called The White Album with two
two albums ago and he's he's more known for um
Fallout Boy and Panic at the Disco. He did that
really big song High Hopes by Panic at the Disco.
(31:48):
But I know him as the guy the frontman for
a Weezer cover band called Wanna Beezer. So he's like
a real hardcore Weezer fan. But um, very very talented
young producer. So I went over to his house and
without even an invention of starting a project, as just
(32:10):
going to say hi, and he said he had an
idea for an album for Weezer, and he described it
to me, and it's basically what we just finished making
is exactly what he set out to make. It is
really his vision from the beginning. And what he said
was no electric guitar. It's just going to be you
(32:32):
on piano, and you're going to bring in all your
love of classical music and we're going to use an
orchestra and you're just gonna totally go for it with
the songwriting and the lyrics and don't try in any
way to be successful. You're just going to make your weirdest, wildest,
most riversy weezery record you can make as a songwriter.
(32:54):
And he gave me a reference album too, is obscure
album called Nielsen Sings Newman, which I'd never heard before,
and it's it's similar to what I just described. Is
very quirky, odd, unsuccessful commercially but super interesting album. We're
(33:17):
all of the songs written specifically for this project. Yeah, okay, okay,
just about every answer I'm gonna give you, it's gonna
have an asterisk by it, which which is except for
the song called all my Favorite Songs so that one
is like that kind of last second. Here is a
(33:38):
song that we that just came up, wasn't written specifically
for this album, but it sounds like it could be
a big song, have a much broader audience, and it
sounds like it could go on the album with a
few tweaks. I guess we have yet to see whether
it's going to be the song that everyone actually knows
(33:59):
from the album or not. But that's that's the intention.
It's the first single, and you know, there's like no
rules when it comes to the first single. Yeah, well
the Beauty of I listened to the album without knowing that,
and I absolutely love that song. And if anything, I
(34:21):
felt like that was the template for the whole album.
So it did not it did not stand out as
not belonging, just the opposite. It felt like, oh, this
is the perfect song, and now we're going to do
a whole album like this. Fantastic. Oh my favorite songs
(35:04):
are slow in oh my favorite people made me man,
everything that feels so good is bad. All my favorite
songs are slow and said, I don't know what's wrong
(35:25):
with me? What's wrong with me? So let's talk about
that song? How did that song come up? What was
going on? When did it happen? Tell me the story
of that song. I think that one came up really recently,
(35:46):
like maybe four or five months ago, and we were
actually working on another record. We were finishing our heavy
metal record called Van Weezer, and my manager sent me
an early version of the song with a chorus. It
was written by one of his favorite writers. Her name's Elsie,
and it was actually like a country song, and actually
(36:09):
sent me a small batch of country songs like song starters,
and I just started playing around with all these country songs,
not really knowing what they're for, and that one, for
some reason, when I sang it, it just it sounded like, Wow,
this sounds like a big universe versal song. It still
(36:30):
sounds like Rivers and Weezer, And we could kind of
massage it onto a couple of different albums. It could
be on a metal album, it could be on Okay Human,
we could make a country album and let's just start
fooling around with it. So we tried. We tried to
put it on I think we tried on Van Weeds
or first, but in any case, it just as we
(36:53):
shifted years into making Okay Human. We realized, as much
as we love the album, it would really benefit from
having that big flag waving single that that brings in
a wider audience to But it's probably a pretty difficult album.
So we started tweaking it to fit an on there
(37:15):
and it worked out really well. Yeah, it fits like
a glove. And again, not knowing the backstory, I would
have assumed that was just one of the batch that
you wrote, and it was a particularly great one, and
it sounds really like you, And the fact that that
started with someone else's shocking to me because it sounds
like a perfect Rivers, perfect Rivers song. Great. Do you
(37:39):
remember by any chance? I know we we history is
neither of our long suits. Do you have any idea
what the first song that you wrote for this for
the Okay Human album was? Any memory? Did you hear
the song bird with a Broken Wing? That might okay,
that might be one of the first or playing my piano? Yeah,
(38:01):
playing my pianos spectacular, It's cool. It's one of my favorites.
Can we can we you mind if we listen to
that right now? No, I'd love to you. Let's listen
to playing my piano? Okay, my wife finds upstairs. My
kids are upstairs, and I haven't washed my hair in
(38:23):
three weeks. I should get back to these zoom interviews,
but I get so absorbent time fly, I just can't
I go. When I'm playing my piano, I'm playing my piano,
(38:59):
I'm counting at the bass, singing at the too. I
never see the song that I'm I'm playing my pian
Heaven cancer, man, Heaven can help this man. Heaven, Heaven
(39:30):
turns his back on this man, Heaven shuts the door
on this man. Actually about that, Um, so I'm I'm
imagining that ending was an improvisation of looking for lyrics.
Is that correct? Yeah, that's my that's my original voice. Note. Um,
(39:54):
when I was writing the idea and I couldn't come
up with the lyric for the last line, and I
was trying all these things, and finally I gave up
and I just sent it to Jake because I like
the melody. He's like, yeah, this is great, And there's
a couple of spots on the album where he's like,
includes these things where you're like, you're not supposed to
(40:15):
show that to people. There was one spot in uh
was it LaBrea tarpits where we were tracking the basic
tracks with Pat on the drums, and right in the
middle of the song, his wife calls, so he just
stops playing. He picks up the phone, he starts talking,
and Jake puts it on the album, like the song
(40:36):
where we're playing the song and the song stops and
then you hear Pat talking to his wife on the phone.
I think that those might be some of the best
parts on the album. I mean, it does. It creates
a reality. It's like, this is really happening. You know,
it's not This is not this plastic thing rapped on
(40:57):
a shelf. This is a live moment in time, and
it's a real sense of reality. And I was I
was really moved by that ending. I thought it was beautiful.
You're looking for the words, and how each of the
choices was good in a different way and all equally
(41:18):
hopeless in their message. I like what I eventually settled on,
not in the voice note, but months later it finally
occurred to me. It's one of those things where like
I know the answer is going to come, but there's
just no way I can sit here and try to
force it. I just have to put it away for
(41:39):
a while and then one day it'll just pop into
my head and hopefully that's before we released the album,
and that's what happened. Luckily. This really feels like an
entirely different world, even though it still sounds like you,
and it still sounds like your songs. How did you
go about recording these songs? Obviously it's different than the
way you've recorded anything else because a whole different it's
(42:01):
essentially a different band, even though it's the players of
the players. It was the most insane recording problems. It
just made me so anxious through the whole thing. I
just really had to trust Jake because he had a
very strong idea for how he wanted to do it,
and it's just totally asked backwards. Forgive my pardon my French,
(42:27):
but he okay, So this is what we did. We
got together at his house, me and Pat and Jake
and Pat never heard the songs before, and they handed
me an acoustic guitar actually in a microphone and said, okay,
play your songs, and then Past is going to play
along like he's like right across from me in the
(42:50):
same room. No baffles. He's just kind of playing softly
and we did like two, three, maybe four takes of
each song, and that those were the drum takes. So
I mean, what you're hearing on the album is pat
like hearing the songs for the first time and trying
to figure out like how it goes, and talking to
(43:12):
his wife on the phone, and it's just kind of
terrifying as as a songwriter, like you want, you want
everything to go right. And so from there and they
really love, they really love that vibe, like that kind
of exploratory and not not too self conscious or not
(43:35):
playing a part. You already know how it goes, so
it has a real sense of vitality to it, I guess.
So then they take those drums and he goes to
the he brings it to the arranger and they listen
to all my piano arrangements and they turn that into
orchestra arrangements and they bring they bring the session to
(44:00):
Abbey Roads Studios in London and record all the strings
and then they ditch my basic acoustic and vocal tracks.
And so at that point you have all you have
her drums and this massive orchestra and it I mean,
obviously that orchestra is usually the last thing you put
(44:22):
on once you have a really solid foundation. Then they
did bass, and then I did all my vocals, and
then finally and then Brian did all his stuff, little
flourishes here and there, a lot of Hammond and acoustic guitar,
and then finally I did my piano, which was supposed
to be the centerpiece of the album. But in the
(44:45):
final version, when you have so many tracks like this,
you end up mute. It's the more you mute, the
better it ends up sounding. So we've muted so much
stuff and one of the things that got sacrificed was
my piano, which is shocking to me because it was
really supposed to be the centerpiece along with the orchestra.
But the orchestra really took over what I was doing
(45:06):
and it ended up being much more interesting to listen to.
So all of the orchestrations are based on your piano parts. Yeah,
I'm really When I listened to it, I'm amazed, like,
how many of these cool little counterpoint parts and melodiasy
here weaving in and around my vocal actually from my
original piano demos like um. But then there's some that
(45:30):
are not me that they came up on their own,
so my ego is totally satisfied because I feel like, Wow,
I didn't I did some amazing stuff. I really contributed
to the orchestration. And at the same time, I'm really
pleased with the string the orchestra arranger, because he contributed
(45:52):
a lot of incredible stuff too. It's fantastic. Yeah, let's
talk about rock my audible cool. Where the idea come from?
I guess for a couple of years, I'd been every
night listening to classic novel on Audible, and I'm not
a great sleeper, so often i'd wake up in the
(46:13):
middle of the night and I'd continue the novel then,
and I it's a really pleasurable state where I'm I'm
not I'm like not not even have asleep, maybe a
quarter asleep, not not really getting the benefits of deep sleep.
But I'm in this very like open what is it
(46:33):
some kind of beta wave thing. I'm just very open,
like I'm living in these novels, and it's such a
wonderful experience like it. But during the day, forget it.
I can't. I don't have the the calmness or the
concentration to read like a thousand page novel or something,
and really get focused and drawn into it, or even
(46:55):
listen to it on audible. But it's just these nighttime
audible sessions that we're so great for me, And so
I wrote a song about it. Great. Can we do
you mind if we listen to that one? No, let's
listen to that one. I can feel my breathing. It's
(47:21):
so nice. It's like a blanket on my life. Let
me stay here for forever. In the state of classical denial,
I'm cranking Missus doll Away, Moby Dick, drip on the world.
(47:41):
He's dyna just like me, with thirsty, folded deep. I'm
gonna round by houdible headphone grapes up five ships off
to a blabon. I just don't care. I just don't care,
Like my houdoball head phone grapes up five ship off
to a blabion. You think I care, I just don't care.
(48:05):
I just don't care. I'm paying. That's so nice. What
a great song that The chorus is really a super
duper anthemic chorus. And it's so funny to hear those
lyrics on that chorus and it works great, But it's
(48:26):
really haven't heard that before? Yeah, I can't remember what
it was like. I remember I went online. I was like, okay,
I got to write a chorus. And I just went
online and I searched for like inspirational phrases and it was,
oh gosh, I'd have to go back and see what
it was. But some really cheesy inspirational phrase like get
(48:47):
up and go or some something like that. And so
that's how I came up with the music and the melody.
And then I was like, well, that lyric is not
going to work, so I just kind of grafted my
other story onto it, onto the uplifting music. It really
works like it's unbelievable. And interestingly, also by using the
(49:11):
current reference of Audible, it almost has a hip hop
like modernity because it's not unusual in a hip hop
song to hear, you know, Audible as a brand, to
hear a brand flaunt it in a song, yeah yeah,
or like Insta or something. But in my case it's Audible. Yeah.
(49:33):
It makes it very modern. It really does. It's really
good cool. I can't wait for people to hear it.
I think it's really I think it's really really good
and it's wow. It's refreshing to hear it sounds so
different yet so much like you, and for the songs
to be so great. It's, i mean, one of my
(49:54):
favorites of your work. Wow, that means so much coming
from you. Thank you. Yeah, it's really beautiful, great work. Well,
I've got to give Jake a lot of credit because
I feel like I'm the same person I was for
It was really his vision and I immediately realist, oh
(50:15):
that's a really cool idea, let's do that, and turned
out just like he imagined. So a lot of credit
to him. Great. Please thank him for me for making
something that I love so much. I will He'll be
very excited to hear hear you sid that thanks the
(50:36):
Rivers Cuomo for entertaining that puzzar conspiracy theory for us.
You can hear all of our favorite Weezer songs on
my playlist at Broken Record podcast dot and be sure
to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com
slash Broken Record Podcast, where we can find extended cutstuff,
new and old episodes. Broken Record is woods would help
Fumy Arose Jason Gambrell, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez,
(51:00):
but engineering help from Nick Chafee and his executive produced
by me a label. Broken Record is a production of
Pushkin Industries and if you like Broken Record, remember to share, rate,
and review us on your podcast at What the Music
Is by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond, bass
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