Since the release of the Blue Album, in 1994, Weezer—the alt-rock juggernaut led by the singer and guitarist Rivers Cuomo—has been influential enough that it’s now almost impossible not to hear echoes of Cuomo’s yearning, melodic voice on contemporary pop radio, particularly in punchy, clever songs by Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift. This month, Weezer put out its twentieth studio LP, the Gold Album. Before Cuomo and I sat down to discuss it, he asked if I’d be open to reading some Shakespeare aloud together: specifically, Act I, Scene 7 and Act II, Scene 2 from “Macbeth.” Cuomo attended Harvard beginning in the nineties. He majored in English and took a course on Shakespeare. “I’m kind of obsessed,” he said. “I go see the same plays over and over and over.” We sat opposite each other at a glass dining table in a midtown hotel suite. Cuomo warned me that he was not a great dramatic reader, but his performance was serious, decisive, earnest. Afterward, I told him that it was nice to be reminded of the particular, idiosyncratic music of Shakespeare’s lines. He agreed. “It affects you even if you don’t understand the words sometimes,” he said.
The night before, Cuomo and the band’s drummer, Patrick Wilson, who co-wrote much of the Gold Album, had appeared as guests on the “Tonight Show.” Cuomo wore a billowy gold lamé suit, a gold top hat, and hastily applied gold face paint. Wilson, who was in jeans, a black Carhartt T-shirt, and Sambas, had draped a gold sheet over Cuomo’s chair so that he wouldn’t smear the upholstery. After chatting with Jimmy Fallon, the band performed “We Might as Well Be Strangers,” a scrappy, distorted new song from the album, which features guest vocals from Karly Hartzman, of the band Wednesday. (Hartzman, who is currently on tour in Europe, was unable to join.) Over the years, Weezer has experimented relentlessly with form, toggling between pop, punk, emo, metal, and even classical—2021’s “OK Human” featured a thirty-eight-piece orchestra—but the Gold Album, with its urgent, chatty rock songs, feels like the band at its most elemental.
Cuomo was born in New York City and raised in various spiritual communities around the Northeast, including Yogaville, an ashram then situated in Pomfret, Connecticut. Now fifty-six, he is a gentle and thoughtful presence. He still wears glasses. On occasion, he closed his eyes before responding to one of my questions, as though he were waiting for an answer to appear on a chalkboard deep in his mind. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.
Yes. I think I imagined that someday I would put out some kind of writing, in a later stage of life. I’m now in those later stages, so. The project I’m most excited about right now is a section of my website called Lore. I’m collecting every experience I’ve ever had, in writing, from my own memory, and then also interviewing other people. It’s this giant resource for anyone who’s doing any kind of biography thing.
Do you imagine threading it together into a meaningful narrative—a book?
That’s somebody else’s job. I like recalling all the details, and not trying to make sense of it all. The part that I enjoy is just getting the events in order—almost like an O.C.D. thing or something. It’s a detective story. “Wait a minute, if I went to pick up my shoes in Manchester, Connecticut, on November 2, 1986, that means I must have gone to Berklee after that.” That sort of thing. I don’t know why—it’s just really fun to put the puzzle together.
Well, catharsis often comes from the imposition of meaning.
Yeah, I don’t do that. Or sometimes I do that, and then I go back and cross it out. It just feels icky, when I go back and read it. It’s, like, “Oh, that’s me now, having some kind of reaction to something that happened forty years ago.” I don’t care about that.
Serialization itself is interesting—the inadvertent or almost incidental meaning that can come from putting one thing next to another thing. I’ve written a little bit about collectors of very rare 78-r.p.m. records. It’s a pretty oddball subculture, and they’re really obsessive about their work. In the fifties, there was a collector named Harry Smith, who compiled “The Anthology of American Folk Music” for Folkways—
He collected mostly prewar American vernacular records. He was very big on completion and serialization. That was a sense-making process for him, acquiring each item in a series, and putting them in the proper order.
That’s one hundred per cent what I’m talking about.
And, for you, there’s peace at the end of that?
It’s soothing. It’s like getting your room super organized or something. I don’t have O.C.D., so I don’t know where this comes from. It’s a lot of journal entries, a lot of letters, and a lot of me re-creating memories—fleshing out the journals, giving them a little more context. Letters from my mom to dad, and vice versa. And then even going back before my life, to my parents’ lives.
Are you learning things about yourself through it?
Yeah. Boy, yeah. I learned a lot about my dad, and that kind of shined some light on my relationship with my son, too.
