Aside from the devastating “The World Has Turned And Left Me Here” and the stirring dysfunction junction “Say It Ain’t So,” the first Weezer album comprises not sob stories but optimistic fantasies. Most people prefer music that makes them feel good, which is why the Blue Album (and, unfortunately, latter-day dreck like “Beverly Hills”) struck a mainstream chord the way Pinkerton never could. But much of Blue’s appeal was its romantic outlook on life, so much so that when they released Pinkerton two years later many fans didn’t know what to make of it. He would get around to fixating on heartbreak one album later on 1996’s Pinkerton, a harrowing breakup opus that did as much as Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary (incidentally, released on the same day as the Blue Album) to shape the face of emo. after high school in search of rock stardom. Throughout Blue, Cuomo still comes off as the starry-eyed Connecticut kid who moved to L.A. Nobody else was hearkening back to Happy Days. In that environment, Weezer’s major keys and doe-eyed story-songs stood out. Grunge was peaking and punk was breaking, which meant the default posture involved a dour disposition or at least heavy doses of snark. In keeping with the geeky identity that has always defined them, Weezer was out of step with popular rock trends when they landed on MTV and modern rock radio. For a vast cross-section of dorks, bros, basics, and aspiring manic pixie dream girls, it is their blue heaven. They pump their fists and drunkenly howl “The workers are going home!” and pour their hearts into every subsequent lyric and air guitar break until all they can do during “Only In Dreams” is gently sway with arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders. The Blue Album just inspires that level of devotion - a sacred text that people feel compelled to revisit it in its entirety. One of the two bands has made a regular thing out of it. As a fellow suburban native, I know two separate groups of high school friends who have assembled well into their twenties to bash the album out in full. Weezer worship runs especially deep among suburban kids like the members of Real Estate, who got their start playing the Blue Album straight through at high school parties. The album was a hit from the beginning, but a few years later, in that dark period after Pinkerton when it seemed like the band might never come back, it became a religion. Weezer’s first self-titled album - henceforth referred to rightly and properly as the Blue Album - hit stores 20 years ago tomorrow, and people are still climbing up each other’s backs singing along to this day. In other words, I had a lot in common with Rivers Cuomo. I was the kind of child who stayed inside to invent my own X-Men while other kids were out playing basketball - so uncool that I could only imagine what cool might be. I don’t think I even knew who the recently deceased Kurt Cobain was at that point that came the following school year when kids in my fifth-grade class started wearing T-shirts with Cobain’s face plastered across the front. I was entranced by the idea of rock ‘n’ roll without actually having experienced much of it yet. I hadn’t yet crossed the threshold from sheltered church kid to faithful MTV viewer, but that world held immeasurable allure for me. It was supposed to be a sad song, but everyone thinks it’s hilarious.I didn’t know my cousins from Cleveland all that well, so it was startling to see the two of them out in the street in front of my other cousins’ house, climbing up each other’s backs, shouting with loopy abandon, “If you want to destroy my sweater/ Hold this thread as I walk away!/ Watch me unravel, I’ll soon be naked!/ Lying on the floor, I’ve come undone!” It was summer 1994, around the time of my eleventh birthday. “Undone” is the feeling you get when the train stops and the little guy comes knockin' on your door. It just perfectly encapsulates Weezer to me – you’re trying to be cool like Velvet Underground but your metal roots just pump through unconsciously. It wasn’t until years after I wrote it that I realized it’s almost a complete rip-off of ‘Sanitarium’ by Metallica. And it just feels so classic to me, even now when the band starts to play it, it just takes over the energy in the room and you’re just transported into the world of Weezer. I just picked up that acoustic guitar and the first thing I played was that riff. “I was trying to write a Velvet Underground-type song because I was super into them, and I came up with that guitar riff. “‘The Sweater Song’ was the first Weezer song I ever wrote, back in 1991,” Cuomo says. “Undone – The Sweater Song” was Weezer’s first single off their self-titled 1994 debut album.įrontman Rivers Cuomo has commented on the song to Rolling Stone:
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