House Music - Rivers Cuomo

Rivers Cuomo is a hard man to get hold of, Gigwise has been trying for a month now but he seems to be everywhere but home. When we finally track him down he's back in Los Angeles readying himself for the European release of his first solo album, ‘Alone - The Home Recordings Of Rivers Cuomo’, which sees tracks written over the past fifteen years collected into one tidy package for his most fervent of fans to drool over. It is not the only project he has been working on recently; there is the much muted memoirs and a new Weezer album in the pipeline but we’ll leave them for later and first delve into the world of Rivers Cuomo, solo artist.

At first Cuomo comes across as a nervous subject, guarded about many of the questions we ask and seemingly quite distracted. However, get him onto certain subjects and he opens up. So we put to him - why did he release ‘Alone…’ at this point in his career? “I’ve always wanted to do it, ever since the mid-90s really. The record company discouraged me from doing that because they thought it would dilute the Weezer name by putting out sub-par material, but I’ve always loved my demos and the special, intimate quality that they have. Finally over the years I just got more and more of them and the urge to release them to the world became over powering. So I put up a stronger fight (with Geffen) and now it's out.”

The tracks that feature on the record were all at some point considered for Weezer outputs but for some reason or another were never released. Cuomo explains: “I usually just write on my own in a private room somewhere and then I bring the demos to the band and then together we decide which ones the band want to do. And these are the songs that the band chose not to do.” While ‘Alone…’ contains eighteen tracks Cuomo is has reputedly written more than 800 songs over the past decade-and-a-half and Cuomo says that he already has plans for another solo release, although fans might have to wait a while till the record actually comes out.

“We’re far away from actually doing that (releasing a second solo album), but I talked to the label and they sounded like they weren’t opposed to the idea but we haven’t had any serious talks about it yet,” he reveals. “I have so many tracks and I’ve already started putting together a couple of different lists which might end up as the track listing for that album,” Cuomo goes on to add. We wonder where he finds all his time because as Cuomo will freely admit the main focus of all his time at the moment is the next Weezer album, their sixth, although he’s a little bit more reluctant to talk about that than he is about his other ‘projects’.

In fact most of our questions about album six are greeted with a response of, “I don’t really want to say too much about that,” or “I don’t want to say something and then the album turn out different.” Why? we hear you ask. Well it seems that the record, which is currently in the mixing stage, is still pretty much undefined in how the finished version will sound even at this late stage (it's out in April). Says Cuomo without giving much away: “I think it could go a couple of different ways that are pretty different to each other.“ And that is all that Rivers will tell us about the album other than to discuss the role of producer Rick Rubin.