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Weezer on New Album 'Pacific Daydream,' Mumble Rap and the Key to Longevity
Weezer photographed on Oct. 9, 2017 at Mates Vineland in North Hollywood
If Rivers Cuomo had his way, the new album from his beloved ’90s band, Weezer, might have taken an unexpected turn. “I had to ban myself from listening to Spotify’s Most Necessary playlist, the one with XXXTentacion
and all the mumble rap,” says the singer-guitarist, 47, letting his
latte go cold in an airy, upscale cafe near his Santa Monica, Calif.,
home. “It felt so creative and mind-boggling. I was listening to it all
the time, and then I’d go to write a song and I’m doing mumble rap. And
I’m like, ‘This is awesome!’ But I’d send it around to everybody and
they’re like, ‘This is horrible!’”
Next to Cuomo sits Weezer
guitarist-keyboardist Brian Bell, 48, who grins and hangs his head,
shaking it like an older brother who knows better. Their sartorial
choices reinforce the image. Cuomo looks ready for the first day of
school: clean-cut, thick black glasses, plaid button-up over blue
chinos. Bell is the stubbled, seasoned rocker, long hair brushing the
top of a chic, loosely draped suit. But even he admits that as Weezer
prepares to drop its 11th album in 25 years as a band, “the secret to
our longevity is the ability and desire to keep reinventing ourselves as
best we can.”
That’s certainly the case with Pacific Daydream, out Oct. 27 on Atlantic and heralded by “Feels Like Summer” (No. 2 on Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart and No. 4 on Rock Airplay), which feels like the crisply beat-powered spawn of Maroon 5 and Twenty One Pilots. With a few power chords in the mix, it’s a solid retort to those wondering what “rock” means in 2017. That song predated the Pacific Daydream sessions, but album producer Butch Walker (Fall Out Boy, Taylor Swift) extended the contemporary vibe by recording the songs in modular bits.
“I would literally get a different guy from the band every day, never
all of them at the same time,” says Walker. “We’d sit down, listen to
the songs and go, ‘OK, where do you fit in as the bass player, guitar
player or drummer in this band?’ It was an interesting science project.”
“We’re
not trying to re-create the 20th-century recording experience,” adds
Cuomo, referring to the band-in-a-room studio approach the group took on
2016’s Weezer (colloquially known as the “White Album”) at
producer Jake Sinclair’s behest. While that LP was nominated for a best
rock album Grammy in February, Cuomo wasn’t satisfied with the music
itself, which he thinks “sounded like 1994 all over again.” Considering
that, what did he want out of Pacific Daydream?
“The same
thing I always want, which is to --” he pauses, sweeps the café with
his eyes, then whispers the next word through his teeth, “-- fucking
break away from who we are and what we have always done and try to
figure out something that’s totally different but incredibly amazing.”
Weezer formed in 1992 during a time of grunge, the power-pop nerd
answer to flannel and angst. The band loved a classic melody and treated
distortion as a precision tool, not a mode. Its 1994 self-titled debut
(the “Blue Album”) had songs about sweaters (“Undone-The Sweater Song”)
and Buddy Holly (“Buddy Holly”) and was a massive success. Except,
says Cuomo, “I remember feeling like, ‘Man, I think we’re the next Nirvana.
We’re a serious, important artist, but everyone thinks we’re just
this quirky, fun pop band. What do I do to change people’s
impression?’”
Famously, he wrote 1996’s Pinkerton, a
darkly introspective follow-up that initially flopped commercially and
critically, but is now -- along with its predecessor -- considered one
of the greatest albums of the ’90s. Maybe that’s why these days, says
Cuomo, “when we hear fans of the early music getting upset by what we’re
doing, we know we’re on the right track.”
Today’s Weezer is
better suited to courting new, younger fans. In addition to obsessing
over playlists (Spotify’s New Music Friday is also in heavy rotation)
and adopting modern recording methods, Bell says touring with Panic! at the Disco in 2016 opened his mind to using samples. The sum of all that is heard on Pacific Daydream, from the neatly cut arena guitars of “Mexican Fender,” to the Justin Bieber-evoking
dolphin cries echoing in “Happy Hour” and disco-kissed trop-pop of “Get
Right,” on through the downcast hip-hop swing of closer “Any Friend of
Diane’s.” Walker says the only influences he openly discussed with the
band were vintage: the clanging urgency of The Clash, The Police’s genre-muddling, the ambitious pop of ELO and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound (“Sweet Mary”). But those pulls blend well with today’s top 40.
Even “Beach Boys,” a song about loving the music of its namesake,
sounds contemporary and revelatory, like Cuomo hanging out with a
bunch of teens and hipping them to their new favorite band: “I’m a
remarkable guy/I’ll keep you trying new things/I’ll keep ya young,” he
sings. As it turns out, the line came from a winter night when he and
Bell went door-to-door in Los Angeles’ Echo Park caroling “with a bunch
of 20-something girls.” It was one of Cuomo’s lyric-generating
experiments, like the time he joined Tinder looking for platonic dates.
“It’s
just this idea of, keep trying crazy new things,” says Cuomo. “Stay
alive, stay young, do the stuff that’s terrifying.” He actually sees
loneliness as Pacific Daydream’s most consistent theme, though
aging also seems to be a concern: On “Sweet Mary” he has “one foot in
the grave”; for “La Mancha Screwjob,” the “clock keeps ticking on like
it’s [his] own private time bomb.” Bell aside, the men of Weezer are all
married with children. Cuomo has two: a girl, 10, and a boy, 5. He
submits that as a lifelong outsider, “getting older is just another way
in which I don’t fit in.”
“I think a lot of people can identify with that,” says Bell.
“Everyone’s middle-school experience was pretty awful. If it was great,
that means you probably peaked at seventh grade.”
So is middle age
the new middle school? “In a way, it’s worse,” says Cuomo grumpily. But
when pressed, he relents. He’s known for possessing an eternal
boyishness -- in his looks, social media acumen and certain lyrics that
reflect an adolescent naïveté -- and Cuomo has no need to be seen as an
elder statesman. “I guess I’m happy to be who I am,” he says. “I’m
grateful I’m a weird, unique character in the history of rock. I’ll take
that.”
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