I feel so much feedback in a very profound way from the 10,000 people who are listening to me, watching me. I just get this deep sense of what works and what doesn't work.
— Rivers Cuomo
The truth is, I hate to perform. I get such bad stage fright, it makes me physically ill.
I don't ever want anyone to think that I'm being judgmental. I gotta do everything I can do to not be preachy.
I had rock-star dreams from 8 or 9 almost nonstop. I thought it was going to be like being a god on earth: having as many women as you want whenever you want them, having super powers, being incredibly wealthy, never doing laundry.
I always loved the 'L.A. Weekly.' I totally looked up to it when Weezer was starting out, and I always wanted to be in it, and they always totally ignored us!
The bonds you make with those records when you're 14, 15 and 16, they'll never be broken, and nothing will ever be as strong as that.
I've tried every which way for writing lyrics - everything from using really bizarre imagery and metaphors, sort of obscuring the facts of what I'm singing about, all the way over to a song like 'Losing My Mind,' where you're just reading my thoughts as they're occurring.
I meditate an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. Once a year I go away for a long retreat. And overall, I just feel more comfortable in my own skin and less anxious, less sad, less fearful.
I'm just living each day, and I'm better equipped to do so. I mean, I used to be totally afraid, I used to have, like, permanent stage fright. But now I'm trying to have fun. I'm trying to bring as much happiness to as many people as possible.
Miley Cyrus' 'Party in the USA' kills me with jealousy. The melodies are out-of-control beautiful.
I think audiences sometimes mistakenly assume a quality performance comes from some great emotional disturbance rather than really intense concentration. Concentration and flow is what it's all about.
It's great - that's the best part about being famous is that people want to get to know me. People come up to me and introduce themselves, and I make friends, and then I meet their friends. It seems like I have a very happy and comfortable social life, which is something I never had when I was younger.
I meditate two hours a day, and every year I do one big long meditation course. I love it, and I'm really into it.
In some ways, I feel like I was Nirvana's biggest fan in the Nineties. I'm sure there are a zillion people who would make that claim, but I was just so passionately in love with the music that it made me feel sick. It made my heart hurt.
Certainly, the Beach Boys and the early Beatles records were a huge influence on me lyrically.
I always like balance. If I'm playing rock music all the time, chances are I'll start craving some lighter, poppier stuff, both to listen to and to play. I compare music to massage. If someone's been working on your back for a long time, you really want them to move down to your legs or something.
I felt frustrated by the limitations of rock and the lifestyle of touring around on a bus and playing the same songs over and over. So I went back to school to study music, and one of the things I got into was the Italian opera composer Puccini.
With no faith, purely as a scientific experiment, I started meditating and watched if it changed my music. It did, but it didn't make it more mellow. It made it easier to get into the flow of creativity.
Growing up, I was a giant KISS fan, and the truth is the record I had was 'Rock and Roll Over,' and there wasn't even a clear picture of them in the packaging! So I really had no idea what they looked like; I just loved their music.
I just gotta keep reminding myself: Every time I do an interview or something, my volition really has to be just to serve, to help people. Not to feel like I'm important.
I decided to try celibacy because I heard it would help the meditation, and I tried meditation because I heard it would help with the music. So, it all really comes back to the music.
Even at your best, the creative moments are still kind of fleeting.
Most people don't really need to hear a six-minute guitar solo that modulates between five keys and time signatures. What they want is a good song.
I guess I'm just a born performer or artist or sharer. I find the intimate details of my life compelling and interesting. I guess that I'm assuming that everyone else does, too.
I've always seen myself as a grown-up. Since I was a little kid.
Meditation hasn't separated me from my life and my friends and my work. It's just made my fear go away, so I can just be that much more engaged.
New country music comprises about five percent of what I hear per year. I enjoy it, but I don't really take note of who's singing it or writing it.
I think probably with any performer, but maybe with rock music especially, the audience wants to see the singer being real, and exploring, and not doing a rehearsed routine, so I'm just constantly looking for new things to try. I'm really curious out there, and my curiosity has led me into all kinds of bizarre situations.
I think I've been skeptical of violent passion for a long time. I think 'Pinkerton' is about that a lot - seeing how, every time I've felt really passionate for someone, as soon as I 'acquire' them or feel like I've acquired them, the passion goes away.
Nothing sounded as sincere as Nirvana's music. It took a long time for me to accept that any other music could be good in other ways. Including my own.
'Easy' is not a word I would ever use to describe touring.
I do want to make music that people love, but I also want to make music that I love. I know I can't please everyone with anything I do, so I don't think too much about how other people are going to take things.
It's so important to me that I feel like I'm doing something that's never been done before, whether that's in the show, or I'm writing a song. I can exist in this little box here, but I have to do something new with it.
At 18, I moved to L.A. with my heavy metal band Avant Garde, which was very much influenced by Metallica. At 19, I got a job at Tower Records, and everything started to change very quickly. I started listening to the Velvet Underground, Pixies, early Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and also earlier music like the Beatles.
What I am best at is reading a book and then writing a critical essay.
I didn't get as much attention as I wanted from girls as a teenager. I thought that if I became a rock star, I would finally get all that I wanted - but it didn't happen.
I really don't need to suffer. I can really become a happy person and still make good music - in fact, better music.
Being in Weezer's just gotten so much more fun over the years. I love almost every part of my job. My very favorite part is working on new songs.
With each step I take, I see that my ability to perform gets a little better. So until it starts getting worse, I'm going to keep moving forward.
I found that so many people in the music business started out as metalheads in the Eighties - whether they're songwriters, producers, engineers or executives, and no matter what they look like, with short hair, suits or whatever. I feel like my generation of metal kids really tends to populate the music world to a large extent.
When you're starting out, you basically have all these assumptions about what it means to be an artist or how to be a rock star. It took me years, through trial and error, to figure out what does work for me. So much of it is counter to the myth of the rock-star life.
I really want to disappear, grow a beard, not talk to anyone, not make any friends... I just want to disappear and study.
People think I'm a freak or something, but I'm actually a really normal guy.
I love writing songs. One of the toughest things is structure; it just works when you use verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge. And as soon as you become aware of that formula, you start to have a bad conscience when you write with that particular structure.
The most nerve-wracking experience is an oral presentation in class. And right under that would be doing 'Saturday Night Live' or 'David Letterman.' One of those shows.
I signed up for eHarmony once, and it took three hours to fill out that online form - so many personal questions. Then I clicked on submit, and instantaneously they responded and said, 'We are sorry, but there is no one any where in the world that is appropriate for you.' So that was it - I gave up.
When 'Nevermind' came out, my roommate had the CD. At first, I actually thought, 'This is too polished and commercial.' It was a little off-putting. But then I was like, 'This is the best music ever.' It felt so close to what I wanted to do.
I think if I wasn't a musician, I would be a high-school band director or orchestra director. I like working with large groups of musicians and bringing out the dynamics and accomplishing something as a team.
I wouldn't say that I relax and enjoy anything. But I think my pessimism helps. I never really expect anything good to happen, so when it does, it's a nice surprise.
Weezer isn't stuck in roles, so we just do what we want to do, what makes us excited.
