‘I need to think like a CEO’: Weezer on the shifting sands of success, ugly feelings and the joy of spreadsheets
As the self-professed geeky rockers release their conceptual 20th album, Rivers Cuomo and Patrick Wilson discuss dodging failure, being saved by fans and their obsessive creativity
The first song Rivers Cuomo wrote for Weezer’s new album, their 20th, blatantly mimics the US rockers’ 1994 debut single, Undone (The Sweater Song). On the track CEO, the singer-guitarist grumbles over a slow, Velvets-y backing about having to crank out “another 90s jam” and wishing he could do “something new – but nobody wants to hear that”. It’s a deliciously meta moment, but also one that allows Cuomo to gently vent “my frustrations over people wanting me to just write songs about our first two albums”.
Cuomo wrote the song straight after SZNZ, the four-album song-cycle Weezer released throughout 2022, each album named after a season. That project fed his notoriously intense, analytic and occasionally obsessive approach to songwriting. Thanks to the kind of data artists have at their fingertips in the streaming age, though, he realised that, with each subsequent SZNZ, “fewer and fewer people were listening to them”.
His response was to “think strategically”. On a video call from his home in Santa Monica, California, where Cuomo, 56, lives with his wife and children, he says he realised: “If I want people to listen to my music, I need to think less like a mad scientist in the research and development department and more like a CEO.” Accordingly, he took several years off from releasing any new material (“to build up demand”), ditched the high concepts of SZNZ and focused on creating what he thinks the fans want.
Like six previous albums, the new album is titled Weezer. It has already been dubbed the “gold” album by fans, due to its sleeve colour. While the arch lyrics to CEO might suggest it is a cynical exercise in pandering to his audience, the Gold Album is a more complex, sophisticated beast.
Cuomo is driven by his obsession with songwriting. “It’s like building sonic architecture, such a cool, stimulating experience,” he says, although he prefers to describe himself as a “composer”. “The term ‘songwriter’ feels like Paul Simon’s about to explain a sombre part of life,” adds his bandmate Patrick Wilson, 57, who plays drums and guitar and joins the interview from the garage of his California home. “What we do is more visceral: busting out a sick riff and saying to each other: ‘Dude, check this out!’”
Cuomo’s approach is methodical to a degree that feels antithetical to rock music; he has boasted that Google Sheets is integral to his process. (One spreadsheet, which he has named “The Encyclopedia o’ Riffs”, keeps track of all his unused and unfinished ideas and is legendary among Weezer fans.) He also can’t resist a kooky conceptual hook to guide his songwriting – see the group’s 2021 heavy metal set, Van Weezer, or OK Human, their orchestral rock opus of the same year, or, obviously, SZNZ.
The Gold Album is similarly conceptual, this time the concept being the creation of an album the Weezer faithful will love. Cuomo’s process has been typically analytical and methodical – and it’s clear he has loved the challenge. He views their live shows as the testing ground for the new material – “where the rubber meets the road”, he says. “I want the people in the room to want to hear these new songs as well as our old hits, and to sing along. I wanted them to be really fun live, to have substantial riffs and guitar parts.” Accordingly, he has taken inspiration from his favourite band of the moment, the Swedish heavy rockers Ghost, whom he says restored his understanding of “the power of stadium-rock riffage”. Nevertheless, much of the Gold Album channels the loud guitars and pop-oriented tuneage of Weezer’s eponymous 1994 debut, often brilliantly so.
The new album is shaped by deeper wounds than those occasioned by SZNZ’s reception, however. The line in CEO where Cuomo says he has “gotta keep this rocket in the sky” references the moment when the failure of Weezer’s second album, 1996’s Pinkerton, seemed to hobble their career before it began – a foundational trauma for the group’s leader.
He remains the pilot of his bandmates’ fortunes as much as his own and, while the Gold Album sounds bold and confident, there are moments in our interview when his anxiety over this responsibility surfaces. They collaborated more as a group on the songwriting of the Gold Album than any previous Weezer release; while Cuomo talks about how their positive feedback was “a real good sign” he might be on the right track with an idea, it’s clear he chiefly prized their solidarity as a group “to give us the strength to face any pushback from the audience”.
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Raised in a Buddhist ashram in Connecticut, which taught him methods to “calm down my body and mind”, Cuomo became a teenage metalhead and, in his late teens, under the influence of the Swedish poodle-rocker Yngwie Malmsteen, formed the hair-metal group Avant Garde. That group renamed itself Zoom and relocated to Los Angeles to make it big, but within a year they had imploded and Cuomo began working at Tower Records in West Hollywood.
This disappointment – alluded to on The LA Sound, a song from the Gold Album, written by guitarist Brian Bell, about a no-hoper metal band running aground on the Sunset Strip circuit – was “heartbreaking”, says Cuomo. But it proved the making of him. “If Zoom had ‘happened’, if my dreams had come true, I would just be the lead guitar player – the second lead guitar player, excuse me – in a heavy metal band that would have been woefully out of style by 1992. Instead, my heart got broken and that led to something a lot bigger and better: singing, and expressing myself, and focusing on songs rather than shredding.”
Weezer formed shortly after Nirvana’s fateful breakthrough. Cuomo had been seduced by the Pixies’ “big crunchy guitars, melody and heaviness” – one of numerous artists he discovered through his Tower co-workers. On Weezer’s earliest demos, he “tried singing like Black Francis or Kurt Cobain or Perry Farrell, more of a ‘rock’ voice. It took months before I finally gave up and sang with my natural, pure voice. I’d sung in school choirs; to my surprise, it still worked, even over the big guitars.”
It wasn’t just Cuomo’s voice that set Weezer against the grain. They wore glasses and unhip clothes, while Cuomo sang about comic books and Dungeons & Dragons. The rock press identified them as nerds, a label they never quite shook loose and ended up embracing: they kicked off this year’s Weezer: The Gathering tour, named after the fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering, with a pickleball tournament with their fans. Regarding this resistance to cool, Cuomo says they “just felt it was very uncool to try and be something you’re not”.
“The kids today would call it ‘being a sweat’,” says Wilson, un-coolly. “In hip-hop, they would have called it ‘fronting’.”
This honesty – along with Cuomo’s infallible gift for pop songcraft – struck a chord in the post-Nirvana cash grab. But as their debut began its ascent to quintuple-platinum status, via a punishing schedule of touring and promotion, Cuomo’s morale plummeted. In his diaries, he wrote of his dissatisfaction with this new rock’n’roll life. Addressing an imaginary rock-star-in-waiting, he gloomily advised: “You will get lonely … It’s not all cocaine, chicks and limos.”
His face is mostly obscured by shadow on our call, but Cuomo’s disillusionment remains palpable three decades on. “All my life. I’d figured that if I got a record deal – if we got on MTV and radio – then I would feel fulfilled and loved,” he says. “We achieved all those things. But I still felt unseen and unheard and misunderstood and lonely.”
Cuomo abruptly ditched the tour bus for Harvard, where he studied classical composition alongside students sporting Weezer T-shirts, oblivious to his presence. The course deepened his feel for songwriting. “Creatively, I was feeling incredibly confident. I was not happy about my personal life, but believed if I isolated myself – and, to an extent, tortured myself – I would be able to create something really great.” He pauses. “I was probably overconfident.”
Inspired by the antihero in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, he wrote Pinkerton, an ambitious, strikingly unguarded confession that success had left Cuomo engulfed by loneliness, disaffection and sexual confusion. Before the album’s 1996 release, he warned the Weezer fanclub that it included “all the parts of myself that I was either afraid or embarrassed to think about before. So there’s some pretty nasty stuff on there.”
Sure enough, Across the Sea depicts him falling in love with a Japanese teenager who wrote him a fan letter (“I wonder what clothes you wear to school … I wonder how you touch yourself”); on Pink Triangle, he grumbles about a lesbian who doesn’t fancy him; and, on The Good Life, he’s “a pig, I’m a dog, so ’scuse me if I drool”.
The album was, he says, an act of catharsis. “It’s always been hard for me to communicate feelings in words, in conversation,” he sighs. “But if I can play them through melodies and chords and lyrics, I feel this tremendous emotional release.”
It was all done with lashings of self-mockery and knowing awfulness, but plenty of fans recoiled. Even Ric Ocasek, the producer of their debut, didn’t seem to like it. Pinkerton flopped; Cuomo put Weezer on hiatus and went into hiding. It was “a chaotic era”, says Wilson, who worried about the impact of Weezer’s steep arc on Cuomo. “I wondered how child stars dealt with success. And I realised: they’re all insane, because it’s a ridiculous process. That period was overwhelming.”
“I’d keep feeling like I’d found my way out, that the way back was just around the corner,” Cuomo remembers, of the struggle to write a third Weezer album. “But each time, just as I’d be about to announce to the guys I had songs I felt confident in, my confidence would collapse again: these songs are terrible. Let me start over. Give me a few months.”
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Salvation came in 2000, in the form of an unexpected six-figure offer to play Japan. After four years of darkness and frustration, Cuomo remembers being “in tears” when his manager called with the news. Next, the band jumped aboard that summer’s Warped tour and discovered that, in their absence, Pinkerton had found an audience that treasured its confessional intensity. “Our fans were out of their minds, chanting: ‘Weezer! Weezer!’ all through the bands on before us,” remembers Wilson. “I knew something was up. Like: oh. We’re going to be OK.”
Today, Pinkerton is recognised as a pivotal emo album. Its follow-up – 2001’s Green Album, again produced by Ocasek and containing the single Hash Pipe – was a platinum-selling hit. “I remember thinking: if we can survive the last five years of solitude and self-doubt and come back to this, we can get through anything,” Cuomo says. “Our fans pulled us out of our self-doubt.” Today, those fans log in to Cuomo’s personal Discord server and watch him practice vocal warm-ups or play Beethoven on his piano. “There’s always this group of people online that love me and appreciate me and are looking forward to hearing anything I’m doing, so I never have to feel alone,” he says.
The fans have stayed loyal as Cuomo has explored unexpected directions – such as the heavy metal of Van Weezer and the orchestral rock of OK Human – and collaborated with songwriters outside his realm, including Linda Perry, Jermaine Dupri and Justin Hawkins of the Darkness. He confesses his obsession with songwriting isn’t always healthy: “There were times where my wife was going through troubles and she really could have used my help. And I would spend all day in my room, just working – super-deep, detailed work – and I told her, like: ‘I can’t help you right now, I’m on a roll here, I really need to focus.’ There has been some conflict.”
This hasn’t happened recently, though, he says. Three decades after the existential wobble of Pinkerton, Cuomo seems happy keeping Weezer’s rocket in the sky. He feels lucky to “have this vocation with these three other guys. We can get in a room together and work on stuff that feels important to us. As you get older, it can be hard to have those kinds of relationships. But we have them.”
The relationships have held strong through traumas that might have destabilised other groups, such as the 2011 death of bassist Mikey Welsh from a suspected drug overdose. The bandmates all “get along pretty great now”, says Wilson. “We all have perspective on everything now. We see how everything unfolded and how deeply unusual it was, and we recognise it.”
Can Cuomo see a time in his life when Weezer isn’t a thing? On the sleeve to 2005’s Make Believe – released during a period of emotional anxiety and voluntary celibacy, for spiritual reasons – he included the soliloquy from The Tempest, where Prospero abandons his magic and commits to “drown my book”.
“At the time, I wasn’t sure I was gonna go on making music,” Cuomo says. “I wanted to try a really intense spiritual path and then start a family. I wanted to step away from the spotlight, from being an artist, even from being creative, and see what else there is in life. So I included that speech, like: OK, maybe this is my retirement statement.” He stops. For one of the few times during our chat, he looks up from the shadows and into his laptop camera, smiling. “But it’s obvious, isn’t it? Come on, Rivers. You can’t escape this.”
• Weezer is released via Reprise/Warner on 21 August