Rivers Cuomo: Odd Even In Aloneness
Jan 28, 2008
Words by Walt Carlson
Illustration by Chris Gregori
Rivers Cuomo hasn’t forgotten what you said. He hasn’t forgiven you, either. He knows you think he didn’t hear you, when you whispered it to the girl he liked back in eighth grade. He could read your words in her eyes as clearly as you like to think you read books. At home, under the covers, a flashlight clamped between his teeth and a guitar resting on his legs, he broke it into verse, melody, harmony, chorus. It was hot and uncomfortable under the sheets; he wrote about that too.
And now, thanks to _Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo_, it’s all coming back to you: how you broke his heart, how you made fun of his little spaceship drawings, how you laughed when he said he liked Ice Cube.
While you were laughing, he was writing and recording with fervor. _Alone’s_ 18 tracks cover 23 years from one of his first band practices ("I don’t want to have my hair like that...but I’m going to anyways.") to "This is the Way," a song (which strangely, some may say "uncomfortably," veers into R&B territory) that nearly made it to Weezer’s upcoming album.
The gem of the collection, the object of curiosity until now kept almost completely hidden, is the small arc of songs from the discarded _Songs From the Black Hole_. The four songs are tantalizing and strange; a glimpse into Cuomo’s mind as he reeled from the success of his first album, his three opinions split and playing off each other.
"Blast Off!" is exciting and quick, thick with distortion, the steady crunch of guitar and drumbeats. And when the robot M1 joins in, reminding the crew not to "forget the purpose of the mission/or Nomis will get swallowed by the sun" the song becomes ridiculous and hilarious, brilliant.
And even though the rest of the compilation never quite reaches the high mark set by the _Black Hole_ songs, Cuomo, during even the quietest moments, sounds eager, elated, to be performing.
He includes a recently purchased and even more recently learned clarinet on "Longtime Sunshine," a song inspired by the name of one his mother used to sing. He gets inspired by a Korg keyboard and his own footsteps to write the now-familiar "oo-we-oo, I look just like Buddy Holly" melody.
Nearly every track is rippled by the grain of tape, but the noise doesn’t detract from the sound. The murmur lends the texture of when he thought of it, when he recorded it. The two moments are, likely, so close as to be almost synonymous. His thoughts captured on the tape almost as soon as they occur.
He’ll look for inspiration, and find it, anywhere. He just wants to get these songs out there, out of him. He might front a rock band, but he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t need people backing him up; so many of the tracks -- the demos -- present themselves fully formed and multi-tracked. He might not have to, but he keeps them around because, like what you said all those years ago, they are a kind of comfort to him.
_Alone_ is what he’d sound like without the rest of the band, his vision in its purest form. See, he doesn’t write this for you. If it was up to Rivers Cuomo, he’d sit in his room, write a song with his window open and you’d stop by and tell him it that you liked it. He’d smile, thank you, and keep playing.
