As the self-professed geeky rockers release their conceptual 20th album, Rivers Cuomo and Patrick Wilson discuss dodging failure, being saved by fans and their obsessive creativity<\/p>\n
The first song Rivers Cuomo wrote for Weezer\u2019s new album, their 20th, blatantly mimics the US rockers\u2019 1994 debut single, Undone (The Sweater Song). On the track CEO, the singer-guitarist grumbles over a slow, Velvets-y backing about having to crank out \u201canother 90s jam\u201d and wishing he could do \u201csomething new \u2013 but nobody wants to hear that<\/em>\u201d. It\u2019s a deliciously meta moment, but also one that allows Cuomo to gently vent \u201cmy frustrations over people wanting me to just write songs about our first two albums\u201d.<\/p>\n Cuomo wrote the song straight after SZNZ, the four-album song-cycle Weezer released throughout 2022, each album named after a season. That project fed his notoriously intense, analytic and occasionally obsessive approach to songwriting. Thanks to the kind of data artists have at their fingertips in the streaming age, though, he realised that, with each subsequent SZNZ, \u201cfewer and fewer people were listening to them\u201d.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/87fc2d187f8d71b39dacad7f447b5260fa8619f7\/0_0_1938_1550\/master\/1938.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=d32fe9be272b4557c09ce9fe2324ba0e\" "\\"\u2018I")
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