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Banff puts its mark on Weezer album
Author: Sandra Sperounes (Edmonton Journal)
Published: September 1, 2010
Majestic mountains. Sumptuous skiing.
Wandering wildlife.
Banff is best known for these attractions, but the Alberta town has another claim to fame - Weezer's new power-pop album, Hurley, due Sept. 14.
The strings on one of the tracks, Unspoken, were recorded at the Banff Centre, thanks to the album's co-producer, Shawn Everett. He grew up in Bragg Creek and studied at the Banff institution.
Weezer's frontman Rivers Cuomo, unfortunately, wasn't present for the session; he let Everett supervise the string players.
"He brought the song in and had the orchestra jam over it," says Cuomo. "It turned out great. I told him what I was looking for. I didn't know what to expect; I didn't know if they would get it or not, then he sent it back to me and they totally nailed it. It was perfect."
This is the latest tidbit to surface about Hurley, Weezer's first effort for the world's top punk indie label, Epitaph. Ever since the Los Angeles musicians unveiled the title and album cover - which features Lost's Hurley, played by ac-tor Jorge Garcia- the Internet has lit up like a forest of Christmas trees.
Any morsel of news - including a possible tour of Weezer's much-beloved first two albums, The Blue Album and Pinkerton - is posted and reposted on music sites, blogs and Twitter, as journalists and fans clamour for details like a pack of marauding children desperate for presents.
"Is it Weezer or is just the nature of the Internet or is there nothing going on in the world right now?" chuckles Cuomo. "Everything seems to be a huge deal."
Here's even more to chew on: Sonic Boom, a one-day music festival this Saturday at Northlands Grounds, is Weezer's only western Canadian date. Hurley features 10 tracks, including classic breezy ballads (Unspoken), tales of love and longing (Run Away), nostalgia wrapped in humour (Memories) and silly stompers (Where's My Sex?, Smart Girls).
Hang On stars Canadian actor Michael Cera on mandolin and backup vocals. Brave New World, co-written with Linda Perry, is about "feeling frustrated and resentful that I'm not getting the things I want in life," says Cuomo. "But then saying, I'm going to go for it! You people can either come with me or stay behind."
Trainwrecks, which echoes with the tolls of a clock, was the first song written after Cuomo's bus crash.
He suffered three broken ribs and internal injuries when his tour bus crashed after hitting black ice in New York state last December. (His assistant was also injured, but his wife and daughter weren't.) Does he feel any lingering effects from the accident? "Just a little bit, but I don't care," says Cuomo, who turned 40 in June. "I'm not dead yet."
Perhaps to prove his point, Cuomo and his bandmates - guitarist Brian Bell, bassist Scott Shriner and drummer Patrick Wilson seem to be in career overdrive. Hurley is the first of several upcoming Weezer albums, including the reissue of their 1996 album, Pinkerton, and Death To False Metal, a 10-song collection of unreleased tunes from the band's days with Geffen Records.
One of the tracks on Death To False Metal? An "amazing Weezer rock cover" of Toni Braxton's R&B ballad, Un-Break My Heart. Sweet.
"I'm just amazed that this album is so weird and intriguing," says Cuomo. "It's a collection of songs that didn't make our records over the last 16 years. Songs that were either too weird, too punk, too pop or too heavy metal, and just didn't fit. Now they have a home, they're all together, the outcasts.
"It's such a cool listen. The opening track is called Turning Up The Radio - I facilitated the writing of the song on YouTube. It took a few months and about 20 steps and hundreds of people got involved and we all wrote this song together. There's a song from 1998 called Trampoline, which is a great pop song. Then a song called Everyone, which is very abrasive punk-metal, and Auto-Pilot, which is new-wave and comes from 2006."
If that isn't enough, Weezer is already working on another new album, which Cuomo credits to the band's humane tour schedule. The foursome tend to play a weekend of dates, then take the rest of the week off.
Twitter, to some extent, also fuels Cuomo's current prolific streak. He uses it to test song titles and in the case of one of Hurley's tracks, Smart Girls, his online interactions with fans ended up inspiring some of his lyrics about the girls who send him flirty tweets.
"Twitter's been a revelation to me," he says. "I guess I've always had random ideas pop into my head - little phrases or titles or song ideas-and I never bothered to write them down. They all just evaporated.
"With Twitter, there's a little incentive to go to the computer and type it out, and get a reaction from my 420-something thousand followers. As the months go by, I get this mountain of little ideas I can draw from. That's like my repository of ideas."
First and foremost, however, Cuomo is a studio rat. While a lot of musicians despise the long hours in a dark, soundproofed room, he thrives in those surroundings.
"It's just so much fun," he says. "It's crazy how much I enjoy working in the studio, making new songs."
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