Rivers Cuomo
In an unconventional interview, HUCK talks to Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo via the weirdness that flows freely through his Twitter feed.
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"Awkward and difficult." That's Rivers Cuomo, lead singer of Weezer, telling me about a pair of flippers he recently wore with a wetsuit. Asked if that meant the flippers were autobiographical, he laughs heartily and says, "I guess so."
I've known Rivers for seventeen years. We met in 1994, when I was an editor at Details (an American men's magazine) and Weezer were enjoying the first flash of success with ‘Undone – The Sweater Song’, an anthem that laid out the band's template: loud guitars, catchy melodies, and lyrics that seemed inscrutable ("If you want to destroy my sweater") but on closer inspection, were emotional and revealing. I edited two articles he wrote for the magazine about life on the road. (Sample excerpt: "'How many emotional outbursts are we allowed?' asks Pat, our drummer, on the shuttle to another terminal. I give him my estimation: one major irrational outburst per 250,000 records sold. Although this means we haven't even earned our first outburst yet, Pat says he's going to go ahead and freak out now.") I learned that Rivers was sly and quick-witted, but also shy and awkward. Raised on an ashram, he sometimes seemed unfamiliar with the conventions of human interaction. Onstage in those early days, he usually let bassist Matt Sharp do any necessary bantering with the crowd.
Since then, Weezer have released eight more albums and sold ten million records worldwide. I've stayed in touch with Rivers by interviewing him periodically (albeit with long breaks, such as the five years he put Weezer on hiatus so he could attend Harvard). Whenever we see each other now, neither of us can believe that we're still in our respective lines of work – journalism and rock, respectively – let alone talking to each other, again. I haven't been around for some of his blackest days – like 1998-1999, which he largely spent alone in an apartment with the windows covered, compulsively writing songs – but over the years, I've gradually seen him become more comfortable in his own skin.
At 9am on a Monday morning, I meet Rivers at a recording studio on the west side of Los Angeles, California. "Where are Weezer recording today?" he asks the receptionist, who doesn't recognise him – understandably, since in his specs and chinos, he looks more like an engineer than the lead singer of a band. Before we start our interview, he sends a few emails and complains that he is constantly putting together sentences with words in the wrong order.
While Rivers once oscillated between celibacy and the aggressive pursuit of groupies, he is now married (to Kyoko Ito, a Japanese native who he met at one of his shows in Boston) and has a young daughter; at age forty, his life is happier and more balanced. But he still has lots of unusual thoughts and obsessions bouncing around his skull, as revealed by his Twitter account. Since July 2009, he's posted over 1,200 tweets, from "Caught my wife looking at nudie pictures of dogs and horses online" to "The reason for my massive, continued success? I have no ego."
In an indicator of the collapse of the music industry, Cuomo has 542,063 Twitter followers on the day of our interview – a number about five times greater than the sales of Weezer's 2010 album, Hurley. Although many of his tweets are deliberately cryptic or out-of-context, Cuomo is happy to explain them at lengths greater than 140 characters. (I’ve preserved the original spelling and punctuation of his tweets.) "I've been wondering when someone was going to use my tweets for an interview," he says, settling onto a couch in the studio lounge. But he has one warning before we start: "I don't know what the point of Twitter is."
Where did all my weird thoughts go before I had twitter? (8 April 2010)
Every day, a really weird thought comes to my mind and I put it out there – and now I have this long list of weird thoughts. I must have been thinking them all along, but there was never any reason to write them down. I actually go back through my tweets to look for lyric ideas. A fair amount of songs in the last couple years started on Twitter. ‘Smart Girls’ on Hurley was originally called ‘Where Did All These Hot Girls Come From’. That was a tweet. I didn't give any context for it, but I was talking about girls tweeting at me – where were they when I was single? And a line in ‘Runaway’: "Is it us making love in the Milky Way?" – that comes from a tweet where I asked if the Milky Way made anyone else sad.
Has anyone you've ever had sex with died? (8 January 2010)
One of my girlfriends had just died from cancer. This is a girl I was going out with around 1995; she had a daughter just a year older than mine. Death is so strange. It's just a mystery. I composed another tweet around that time and never posted it because it was too bitter. I have a whole list of tweets that I held back for various reasons. One of the lists is too dark, too negative, too jaded, too cynical, that sort of thing.
Veggie burger technology has come a long way. (6 November 2009)
That's true. And life in general for vegetarians has gotten a lot better since I was a kid. Growing up vegetarian in upstate Connecticut, it was definitely inconvenient and the options were limited. So I'm happy for my daughter's sake.
Check out the full feature in HUCK #026, out now.
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Rivers Cuomo (text) by Gavin Edwards is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (3)
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Glad it's so much easier to be a veggie now days. People think you have to eat like a rabbit, can't enjoy & is boring & the whys and debate.