User:Jeremy/4 Shades of Black

PRELUDE AND DISCLAIMER

So, this isn't done, and I'm not sure when it will be, or if I'll even go back to finish it, but what lays below you is an old, circa 2024 understanding of the development of Weezer's Black Album. It's a bit out of date, there are some small details that may be inaccurate or even provably false at this point, but it's a good jumping off point for those unfamiliar with the history of the album, you'll get the broad strokes well enough. And if Karl likes it, you can too!

haha oh. Jeremy, you should check the page that Jeremy has been working on.

—Karl Koch, Upon me asking him about the inception of Pacific Daydream and the cancellation of the first black album.

4 Shades of Black

"I’m working on a new album, the Black Album, which is going to require new psychological techniques, new writing techniques, new places to hang out, like Echo Park and Silver Lake. Psychoanalysis is going to play a big role. It’s going to be more R-rated, with maybe swear words for the first time on a Weezer album.”

Over the course of four years, Rivers Cuomo would spent countless hours demoing and recording songs for a successor to Weezer's 2016 White Album. It would evolve through multiple concepts, track lists, producers, and even the complete scrapping of a finished album. Through trials and tribulation, both success and failure would help shape what would eventually be come to known as 2019's The Black Album.

2014-2015: It's Always so Black and White

Following the critical success of Weezer's ninth studio album Everything Will Be Alright in the End, Weezer had high expectations to live up to, they had dropped their record label for the second time in a row, and were unsure of how to follow it up. Their new management at Crush, Dustin Addis, teamed them up with an engineer from their seventh album, Raditude. Jake Sinclair would be the producer for Weezer's yet untitled tenth studio outing, Dustin would also provide one more suggestion, write a beach record, Cuomo would later say “It was one of those things where it’s so obvious that we never even realized it.” While sonically, EWBAITE felt more like a "back to basics" for the band, conceptually, it was anything but. While Weezer had toyed around with concept albums and rock operas before (see Pinkerton and its predecessor, Songs from the Black Hole, which tell the story of Rivers in the 90s in a literal and metaphorical way respectively), they had never done a story on exactly this level before, with teaser short films, multiple concepts and themes, and a huge script detailing all of it. Whatever Weezer's new record was to be, it was to be... simpler, much to Cuomo's chagrin, "our producer was very much the voice of conservatism."

Weezer was to go into the studio to record around summer of 2015. It was likely around fall of that year, when the album was closer to finishing its recording, that Dustin Addis suggested the title for the project: "We were performing at some TV show, and my manager came in the dressing room and said, 'All right, you’re not gonna like this, but how about we call this album the White Album?' and I kind of groaned." Cuomo disliked this, as alongside the sound and general concept, the album was harkening back too much to their 1994 debut. "God, I’m so tired of it. I’m very careful in my own messaging never to say, 'This sounds like how we used to sound.' I’m always trying to emphasize the new things we’ve tried. But it’s just really hard to get that through. We’d have to make a record that sounds absolutely nothing like anything we’ve done before, and only then would people give us some credit for doing something original." It was what Addis suggested next that satiated rivers. "then he said, 'And that means the next album can be the Black Album!' and I was like, that’s cool, I’m in. That’s all it was."

One of the key tenets of The Black Album was to be completely different from The White Album, "I was the voice that was saying, 'Let’s do something radical.' [Jake Sinclair] was kind of pulling in the other direction, and I think that tension is what [The White Album] is all about. He won on this album, and I’m gonna win on [The Black Album]." Work on demos began while White was still in the recording process, "I’ve been working on it for the last six months" said Rivers in March 2016. While White focused on the "beach side" of Los Angeles, Black was to focus on the city. "[Black] started as the antithesis or the b-side of Los Angeles. Thematically, white fits with the beach and the colour black fits with the city. Ever since we wrote the beach album, we kept the concept of that duality in our heads until we had the right songs to release the Black Album." Brian Bell said. "White Album is cool ‘cause then next we can do a Black Album and it'll be like super dark. Already working on those songs. I just love contrast." “The next album is going to feel like an urban environment, night-time and gritty and hopefully a lot more modern sounds, synthesised sounds, samples maybe." It is unknown exactly what demos were recorded for the Black Album in 2015, but one demo from Alone XII entitled "Al's Bar" was erroneously referenced by Bell as being a part of the Black Album, meaning it was potentially in consideration for the album at some point. The specifics of 2015's Black Album demoing period remains a mystery to this day, and what would follow in 2016 would usher in a new era of Black Album, with a lead single attached.

2016-2017: Does it Feel Like Summer to You?

Soon after the White Album Tour, Cuomo would return to writing demos for the Black Album, although, by March, Cuomo stated he was already halfway done writing the album. While through the myriad of co-writes, nondescript demos, and overlapping albums, it appears impossible to discern exactly what songs were a part of this writing process, two appear to be a part of the Black Album at some point in time. "Feels Like Summer", and "High As a Kite" (unrelated to the song that would later take on that name), both cowritten by Jonny Coffer in 2016, "High as a Kite" being quite an interesting demo, as it includes elements of two future songs "Get Right", and "Living in L.A.", it is currently unknown if this demo is where these two songs originate from, or if they had existed before this demo. By the release of the White Album in April 2016, Weezer was prepared to return to the studio in October of that year to record the Black Album.

Although, while Weezer was attempting to record the Black Album, something else felt far more tempting. The only songs we know of that were recorded by a full band at this time are "Feels Like Summer" and "QB Blitz", which may have not even been for the Black Album at all. You see, on March 15, 2017, "Feels Like Summer" would release as the lead single for Weezer's upcoming album, the name of said album was strangely not mentioned as the Black album. What was seemingly happening behind the scenes was a total reconstruction of what "Weezer's upcoming album" would be. During the writing process of the Black Album, Cuomo found himself writing more and more songs that were unlike his concepts for the album, and instead set up a new Dropbox folder, simply titled "Beach". Cuomo said "I would write every day and put the MP3s in a folder called The Black Album in my dropbox, and I began to write some songs that didn’t fit in that folder but they were still good. So I made a new folder and put them in there and that was the one that got filled first." On August 13, Scott Shriner would comment on the uncertainty of the Black Album. “We’ll have to hold off on that title, at first we were thinking it would be called ‘the Black Album’ because we did kind of a summer album the last time with our ‘white album’ — so we’ll do something a little darker this time. Once they get a collection of songs together, [Crush Management]’ll get a better idea of what the concept’s going to be.” he also mentions producer Butch Walker, who would go on to produce the next album. Speculating off of this article, it appears that seeing the amount of songs that filled the "beach" folder, management may have wanted Weezer to produce an album based off of these songs, as "Feels Like Summer" had already released, that song and perhaps others from that era of the Black Album, were implemented into this new album. (see "Get Right".) And later in 2017, Weezer would go into the studio to record their new album, with a working title of Somebody's Daydream. Cuomo at points compared the writing of the two albums to Pinkerton and Homie. "I wrote [Homie] at the same time as I wrote Pinkerton. If a song was lighthearted, I put it in the Homie pile. If it was darkhearted, I put it in the Pinkerton pile. Having both piles allowed me to write whatever I was feeling without having to worry if it was too dark or too light."

On August 17, 2017, Weezer's eleventh LP was finally unveiled as Pacific Daydream. On Zane Lowe's Beats 1 show, when premiering the song "Mexican Fender", Cuomo claimed the Black Album was still in production and "almost ready". A new Black Album entered production around the time of Pacific Daydream wrapping up production. The last single from Pacific Daydream, "Happy Hour" was to be featured in a brand new music video starring Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy, before being scrapped. "That video has a funny history. It was originally the video for a song called 'Happy Hour,' from our last album, Pacific Daydream, and then we kind of gave up on the album and the single before it even came out." Cuomo said. This music video would later be used for the lead single of this brand new Black Album, the track first known to the fanbase as "Cardigan Disaster", and later, "Midnight".

2017-2018: Midnight vs. Africa

How does something like this happen? Weezer was prepared to record the Black Album, and if "Feels Like Summer" is anything to go by, they even had a producer attached with Coffer. "We set out to do the Black Album, which was to be the opposite of the White Album... There's just something about the beach and the sun. That's just very much a part of who we are, and it's hard to turn the other direction, especially when I live right here by the beach in L.A." Cuomo said. He also teased the death of this older iteration of the Black Album, and the upcoming new one. "We still have those Black Album songs... But I've been writing recently, and now something else is happening with some more piano-based songs." It seems that by the release of Pacific Daydream in October 2017, this new version of the Black Album was close to being finished, and Cuomo even had a deadline of May 2018. "The Black Album is almost done," said Cuomo in a release interview for Pacific Daydream, "and hopefully it comes out in May."

It's hard to tell exactly when this version of the Black Album began recording, but we can pin down a couple songs to it. Cuomo released the Black Album portions of Alone XIII over the course of a few weeks in 2024, and we can see when demos were uploaded to his Dropbox and if they correlate with the rough recording period of October 2017 to early 2018. The most obvious song attached to this Black Album is "Midnight", as it was revealed in an email to the Weezer Fan Club on October 14, 2018, that "Midnight" was to be the lead single for the Black Album at some point. Another song that we can confirm was a part of this album was "Runner-Up" says Cuomo: "One of my favorite songs right now, it’s called 'Runner-Up,' and, I mean, when I wrote it on piano and vocal, it sounds — the first thing that comes to minds is Pinkerton-esque... But then the way it was produced — my piano is in there, but then there are all these electronic, dark elements that sound like nothing we’ve ever done." If we allow ourselves to delve deeper into speculation, we can also attribute the song "Almost Beautiful" to this album, it might even be one of the songs recorded for it, as it has a large amount of demos, using the Dropbox method mentioned earlier, we see they were uploaded from the months of August 2017 (for version 1) to February 2018 (for version 23), almost exactly the time period of this Black Album's production. Another song that follows almost the exact same pattern is "It's Not the Same as It Was", with version 7 of that song being uploaded in November 2017, and version 18 being uploaded also in February 2018. With the timeframe of those demos, I find it safe enough to assume they were either heavily considered for this Black Album, or were even recorded in studio for it. A notable credit on the final Black Album's release is an "additional production" credit for Jonny Coffer on "Living in L.A.", considering this song has its roots in the "High as a Kite" demo from the "Feels Like Summer" iteration of the Black Album, could this song also have found its way onto the new Black Album? Potentially. A co-writer for "Midnight", Rami Yacoub, also has a co-write credit on the final Black Album for the song "Zombie Bastards", although aside from this credit, it's impossible to tell which iteration of the Black Album that "Zombie Bastards" was written for. Production on this Black Album continued throughout late 2017 and early 2018, and was all but completed. There was only one major flaw, to quote Cuomo: "I really liked it, my manager really liked it, but nobody else on earth liked it." In an interview during a private concert with KFOG, Cuomo talked about the state of the Black Album: "Prince had [a black record] too, and I think ours is gonna be more like his, in that it never came out... We've already tried to make it once, and ended up doing Pacific Daydream instead, so we tried again with this one, and it's not easy."

Meanwhile, in December 2017, Cleveland resident Mary Klym started a twitter account under the tag @WeezerAfrica, with the main goal of getting Weezer to cover Toto's "Africa". It feels worthless to take you through the entire saga, but it ends with Weezer recording a cover of both Toto's "Rosanna" and "Africa". The exact timeline of this is uncertain, but it's worth speculating that these were recording during the final sessions of this version of the Black Album. Unexpectedly, "Africa" SKYROCKETED through the charts, and became the band's first Hot 100 hit since 2009, and reached number one on Billboard's Alternative Songs chart. As a result, the entire Black Album was scrapped. To quote the fan club email from earlier: "'Africa' was intended to be a fun quick thing to help promote the upcoming tour, but then it caught fire. So the plan to release 'Midnight' was scrapped." Between the internal negative reception to the album, and the popularity of "Africa", a new and final version of the Black Album would begin production a few months later under the codename "Sitek Album".

See Also

• Alone XIII: The Pacific Daydream Black Years
• Weezer (The Black Album)
• Weezer (The White Album)
• Weezer (The Teal Album)
• Pacific Daydream
• Midnight
• Runner-Up
• Spell
• Black Album bio
• Black Album bio (Interview with Rivers Cuomo and Dave Sitek)
• Draft:Weezer Recording Chronology: 2016-2018