View source for Rolling Stone article - September 16, 2010

ON THE WAY TO A SPECIAL PERFORMANCE AT THE MIRAGE, [[Rivers Cuomo|RIVERS]] TALKS ABOUT GETTING PERSONAL.

"In the past, whenever I tried to experiment with screaming, my voice started to hurt and it felt unnatural," says Rivers Cuomo, the [[Weezer]] frontman. "This time around, I kinda broke through that unpleasantness." The result is the eighth album from the power-pop stalwarts, ''[[Hurley]]'', their most visceral, rubbed-raw, energetic and punked-out to date. Cuomo stretches and distends his voice into prismatic bursts, the band's reliable hooks come smudged with an extra layer of distortion, and an album-closing ballad is taken almost entirely from a demo recording. It is all just a part of Cuomo's vow to make a "very personal, very Weezer statement."

''Hurley'' has the gloriously unpolished feel of a scrappy unsigned band-recorded while Weezer went unsigned for the first time in 18 years. There are no big name producers and no label influence. It was tracked in a garage studio located in the back of a friend's house, and recorded with a fraction of the budget of last year's blow-out ''[[Raditude]]''. Cuomo says it was inspired in part by recent indie rock releases such as Sleigh Bells. Within a year, Weezer went from working with the go to hitmakers to sounding like caffeinated teenagers self-releasing their own record. Hurley is, in fact, being released as collaboration between their own {{=w=}} Records and punk totem [[Epitaph Records|Epitaph]]. 

Just a few hours ago, Cuomo was on stage at a pro-surfing tournament - a sun-kissed, beachside gathering at Huntington Beach Pier-performing for a sandbox of buff bodies and bathing suits. "It's been a while since we saw young women in bikinis," jokes the consummately coy singer, "so we were all kinda shocked, like, 'Is this legal?'" Watching his onstage antics - existing in the spastic space between rock bravado and a winking alt-rocker take of it - it's hard to believe that only a few months ago, he was laid up in a hospital bed. A substantial portion of Hurley was written in the wake of a December bus crash that derailed the band and left Cuomo with three cracked ribs. Cuomo wasn't really writing songs in the hospital, even though a doctor was kind enough to lend him a guitar to fiddle around on. The drugs had sapped his drive to compose, so he weaned himself off them as soon as possible. As it turns out, music is a natural painkiller.

"I had so many unpleasant symptoms: aches and pains, stiffness, lack of energy," says Cuomo, "but I noticed that, as soon as you put a musical task in front of me, all the negative symptoms disappeared. I just felt like I was full of energy and there was no pain and I was totally concentrated on working on music-so that's what I did all the time. As soon as it came time to stop working and go inside for dinner or something, then I noticed all the pain again."

The first song he worked on out of the hospital was "[[Trainwrecks]]," Hurley's most beaming moment, a monstrously huge major-key, fists-to-the-heavens anthem that's more arena-ready than anything they've ever done. An experiment in writing from the perspective of an archetype, Cuomo picked "a charming loser" as his muse, a mischief-maker he likens to Puck from ''A Midsummer Night's Dream''. "It felt like this is a real special song," says Cuomo, "I don't know if it's good-different, or weird-different. I guess you never really know until you see how the audience reacts."

Maybe it's a good sign - he's had this feeling before. Says Cuomo, "I guess another example would be '[[Hash Pipe]].' We were known for major key pop songs until that point and then we come out with this chunky metal riff. I remember one of the first critical reactions was that it sounded like Weezer was trying to be nu-metal."

Keeping in Weezer's tradition of cuddly left turns is ''Hurley'''s album cover, a blown-up photo of actor Jorge Garcia, who played Hugo "Hurley" Reyes on Lost. Cuomo met Reyes when they were both scheduled to appear on a late night talk show and stopped the actor for a photo together. "We called him to see if he'd be cool with being on the cover of the record and he said, 'Yeah.' And then we invited him to come up and play a state fair with us in Paso Robles. Flying with him was a little sketchy. On a private plane, you got the guy from ''Lost'' and the guy who's known for writing the song about "[[Buddy Holly]]..."

"It's so striking as an album cover," continues Cuomo. "A lot of times when we come up with a real Weezer idea, it's like a bell goes off in my head and I can't really explain why I think it's great. It's so against everything else that's popular right now. And at the same time it's just so great and warm."

<big>RIVERS FLOWS</big>

{{Interviewer|Rolling Stone|WOULD YOU SAY THAT HURLEY IS MORE OR LESS PERSONAL THAN RADITUDE?}}
{{Rivers|I think people are going to hear it as a lot more personal than a lot of what we've done. I don't like to compare because so often I'll write something personal and people will think it's really cheesy and fake.}}
{{Interviewer|Rolling Stone|WHAT'S AN EXAMPLE?}}
{{Rivers|Um, "[[Beverly Hills]]" is a perfect example. It's a very sincere, very literal complaint about my loneliness and wanting to be more successful socially and to get married and be part of the musical celebrity establishment in L.A. A lot of people say it's cheesy or that I'm making fun of Beverly Hills lifestyle or something like that. To me, it's one of the most personal songs I've ever written.}}
{{Interviewer|Rolling Stone|DID THAT TAKE YOU BY SURPRISE WHEN THAT HAPPENED?}}
{{Rivers|No. The time I was most surprised was when we put out our [[Weezer (The Blue Album)|first record]]. I thought we were going to be taken very seriously, "[[Undone - The Sweater Song]]" was a song about depression, and then everyone said we were this funny geek band and I was so shocked and disappointed. Ever since then, I have come to expect that; there is this disconnect between me and a lot of casual listeners. Some people get it and some people will never get it.}}
{{Interviewer|Rolling Stone|YOU'RE REALLY SCREAMING AND PUSHING YOUR VOICE ON THE NEW RECORD...}}
{{Rivers|Yeah. I visualize really weird scenes that have nothing to do with the lyrics necessarily... I remember in "Trainwrecks," near the end of the second bridge... I can't remember exactly what it was, but it involved a forest gnome and a broad sword and it really brought out this amazing quality in my voice...}}
{{Interviewer|Rolling Stone|WHAT'S "[[Where's My Sex?|WHERE'S MY SEX]]" ABOUT?}}
{{Rivers|I can't remember if it was my 2-year-old daughter who said it, or my wife said it, or my wife told me that my daughter said it... One of them accidentally said, "Where's My Sex?" instead of "Where's my socks?" She couldn't find her socks. And when I heard her say, "Where's my sex?" I just thought, "There's a cool song title right there." So I went and started writing like crazy and wrote out all the lyrics. First I just wrote it so the song was all about trying to find your socks... how terrible it is when you're not wearing socks. Then I went back and changed a few letters in the words and now it's a completely different animal.}}
{{Interviewer|Rolling Stone|THAT'S A PRETTY COOL SONG-WRITING TRICK.}}
{{Rivers|Yeah, that was fun. Also, "[[Smart Girls]]" was another thing like that - it was originally "Hot Girls" about how frustrating it is to have all these amazingly hot girls tweeting at me, and it was so frustrating because I'm not in that life-stage anymore where I can do anything about it. So I wrote this song, "Hot Girls," that ultimately ended up feeling too macho or something. So we just changed it to "Smart Girls" and then every other lyric stayed the same and it's a really cheesy song about girls, but changing that one word makes it completely different and interesting... That reminds me of "Back in the U.S.S.R." by [[The Beatles]]. They changed the setting and it becomes cool... Sometimes songs take on a life of their own and you have to follow it.}}