**Photo by Emily Shur*[

5-10-15-20](http://pitchfork.com/features/5-10-15-20/) features people talking about the music that made an impact on them throughout their lives, five years at a time. For this edition, we spoke with 44-year-old Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, whose latest album,* Everything Will Be Alright in the End*, is out now.

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Cat Stevens' music, voice, and energy made me feel so secure. He sounded different from some of the paternal figures in my life, so gentle and kind. And also you have this sense that he was really seeking to become a better person—not just a tough guy. On "Father and Son", he's addressing a relationship that you don't normally hear in a pop song and singing about it from both sides with so much emotion and sympathy. That hit me in a deep spot and gave me a different kind of role model that I've carried with me ever since.

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There's no way I could do this interview without mentioning Kiss. Rock and Roll Over was the first Kiss album I heard, but I was totally oblivious to their whole image and the makeup and all that. I was so out of touch with the wider world. [Cuomo was raised in an ashram in Connecticut.] All I had was the album, and there was just this mandala image on the cover. I had never heard anything like that, and it completely electrified me and my brother. A friend had left the record at our house, and we taped ourselves listening to it and running around on the coffee table in circles, over and over. The friend took the LP back, so all we had was this cassette of us listening to the record and screaming—and that's what I listened to for a year.

I didn't understand the lyrics at all. As a matter fact, I don't think it was until my 20s that I realized, like, "Holy cow, I can't believe I was listening to all this stuff." All the sexual references totally went over my head. It was just the energy in the guitar, the distortion, the projection of power. It was like the flip side to Cat Stevens’ nurturing male figure; so in those first two picks, you’ve got me summed-up.

Metallica's "Ride the Lightning" has that amazing, heavy guitar riff in the middle that’s in the Phrygian mode, and I hadn't heard music in that mode yet. It's so dark and sad and suggestive of something evil. And my buttons for all of those different feelings just hadn't been pressed yet. It opened the door to this whole other world of intense anti-sociability and non-conformity and the desire to really go against society and shock people and take down the man. Me and my friends grew out our hair and wore crazy, torn-up jeans, and we started getting into things like key changes and time changes and complex, 10-minute instrumentals. And moshing.

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. Around that same time, Weezer started. I met them through co-workers at Tower and, one by one, we cut our hair and stopped doing the sweep picking and two-handed tapping. And we came up with The Blue Album.

But if I have to choose one song, it's gonna have to be "Sliver", because this other guy I worked with named Howard said, "Rivers, we're going to play you this song by this new band Nirvana and we think you're gonna like this." It was just one of those things where, by the time it got through the first chorus, I was just running around the store. The music turned me on so much. It had the simplicity of the Velvet Underground in the structure and the chords and the lyrical theme—it was talking about family issues from this very innocent perspective. It had the melody and the major chord progression of the pop music I love, like ABBA, but also this sense of destructiveness that I had in me, and it came out in this new hybrid style.

Pitchfork: Did you ever cross paths with Kurt Cobain?

No, not once. When Weezer was making The Blue Album, that was right around the time In Utero came out. He died in April [1994], and The Blue Album came out in May. We were on the same label, and it's possible he could've heard it, but he probably had never even heard the name Weezer. It's sad for me, because he's probably my all-time hero, but at the same time, I'm kind of relieved, because he probably would've scorned us.

Since my teens, I'd been very into classical music and had a great ambition to be a classical composer. 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. One of my favorite operas by him was Madama Butterfly, specifically when the role was played by Maria Callas. On tour, I would listen to her every night after the show and be so moved by the depth of emotion and sadness and tragedy. It really was calling to me, like, "Come on, Rivers. You can go there. You can go much further with your music than ‘The Sweater Song’ or ‘Buddy Holly’.”

The biggest thing to turn me around [during the making of 2001’s The Green Album] was the all-around failure of Pinkerton and feeling like, "Oh my goodness, how could I have been so deluded? You can't throw out the accepted structure of songs and try to make this operatic masterpiece with all these insanely personal lyrics. You're embarrassing everyone and you let your audience and your band down. Let's do a 180 here." So I got super interested in early pop-rock music like pre-drugs Beatles, Beach Boys, and even going further back to records like Hank Williams. [A Hard Day’s Night] is all like two-minute songs, and they all have the exact same structure, which is, by the way, the same structure used for every song 15 years before that. Each verse has the same melody, each bridge has the same melody, there aren't even choruses, just verse bridges, and you can tell they're not singing about anything remotely personal. And it's incredible! I was very inspired by that record. It's just so structurally perfect—every note complements the note that came just before it. In fact, we did some rehearsals where we did all the early Beatles songs and then, under the name Goat Punishment, we played all-Nirvana sets and all-Oasis sets. I was so interested in studying the structure of these great song forms.



The mid-2000s, through Make Believe and leading up to The Red Album, was a really, really fun time. I started to look back, recognizing that all the different things I'd been into were valid, and I wanted to bring it all together. But there was a new ingredient that came on board around this time: Eminem. I got three of his records at one time, and I just felt [The Slim Shady LP]. I guess I was behind the times; it was the same with listening to the Beatles when I was 30. I just go for whatever I happen to be excited about in the moment. It was such a new sound and a new way to communicate through music. He's able to convey so much information with his lyrics and the rhythm and sound of his voice, but there's next to no melody there. You can really hear me trying to assimilate some of that in "Heart Songs" from The Red Album, which is very much in line with the theme of this interview: going back through my history as a fan of music and trying to make sense of it all.

Pitchfork: It's rare to discover Eminem at the age of 35. How did you reconcile being inspired by this artist who was an incredible talent, but often used his lyrics to denigrate his parents, his wife, and homosexuals?

You can listen to it on two levels. A lot of the time I was listening on a technical level and seeing how he accomplished what he wanted to accomplish. And then one could also listen on the level of content and message, and I don't agree with or necessarily like some of what he was saying. But it doesn't prevent me from appreciating how he does it. Sometimes it's unfortunate when an artist goes to places, content-wise, that I think are not in the best interest of the universe. In a lot of cases, artists get deluded into thinking that their art requires them to put on some dark energy or to take some kind of drugs or something, but I don't think that necessarily makes their art better—it just makes it drugged or gross. They could accomplish the same technical feats with more helpful content.

By far, the most influential record of the last four years for me was Pinkerton. It got reissued [in 2010], and we did a show where we played the whole album from beginning to end to celebrate, which turned into a series of shows we called the Memories Tour. The experience of learning those songs again, singing them every night, working on them with the guys, and then being in a relatively small venue with 1,000 of the most hardcore Weezer fans and hearing them sing every syllable, seeing them air drum all the fills—it was such an amazing experience and so different from what we'd been doing the years before that. We were playing mostly arenas and big festivals, a lot of the times for a very general audience that didn't know Pinkerton at all and didn't know much about Weezer. So it was a great feeling of validation from the fans, for this album that was so personal to me and had been such a source of pain for years. To feel loved and accepted for this very honest part of myself was inspiring.