Exclusive
Rivers Cuomo, Patrick Wilson, Brian Bell, and Scott Shriner go deep on The Gold Album
Midway through Weezer’s The Gold Album, due Aug. 21st, Rivers Cuomo offers an apparent glimpse into his onstage thoughts. “Cranking out another Nineties jam,” he intones in a spoken-word verse on the track “C.E.O.” “Wish I could do something new/ But nobody wants to hear that/ They just want the classics/ You can’t blame ’em, really/ There’s something special about your early shit.” The guitar parts beneath him bear some resemblance to “Undone (The Sweater Song),” which might seem like part of the joke, except there’s no joke at all.
As Cuomo explains, “This question’s come up in the past — how tongue-in-cheek are you in ‘Beverly Hills,’ for example, or when you say, ‘What’s with these homies dissing my girl?’ I don’t think I’m being tongue-in-cheek at all. If you were to read my mind at that time, those were the exact thoughts that would be going through it.”
“Here comes the C.E.O.,” the song’s chorus goes, but it originally was “I’m the C.E.O.” In both versions, Cuomo is singing about his discomfort with becoming, in essence, the head of the commercial enterprise that is Weezer, Inc. “I was bemoaning the fact that I’m finding myself in this role that doesn’t really work with being an artist,” Cuomo says. “Everyone loved the song, but nobody liked that line. We ended up externalizing it — it’s like I’ve externalized this part of myself that’s bringing down the party.” Along the way, drummer Patrick Wilson pitched “I’m C-3PO” instead, which was tempting: “I really liked that one,” Cuomo adds.
