Rivers Cuomo
I meditate two hours a day, and every year I do one big long meditation course. I love it, and I'm really into it.
I signed up for eHarmony once, and it took three hours to fill out that online form - so many personal questions. Then I clicked on submit, and instantaneously they responded and said, 'We are sorry, but there is no one any where in the world that is appropriate for you.' So that was it - I gave up.
I think I've been skeptical of violent passion for a long time. I think 'Pinkerton' is about that a lot - seeing how, every time I've felt really passionate for someone, as soon as I 'acquire' them or feel like I've acquired them, the passion goes away.
It's great - that's the best part about being famous is that people want to get to know me. People come up to me and introduce themselves, and I make friends, and then I meet their friends. It seems like I have a very happy and comfortable social life, which is something I never had when I was younger.
I think audiences sometimes mistakenly assume a quality performance comes from some great emotional disturbance rather than really intense concentration. Concentration and flow is what it's all about.
I love writing songs. One of the toughest things is structure; it just works when you use verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge. And as soon as you become aware of that formula, you start to have a bad conscience when you write with that particular structure.
New country music comprises about five percent of what I hear per year. I enjoy it, but I don't really take note of who's singing it or writing it.
Meditation hasn't separated me from my life and my friends and my work. It's just made my fear go away, so I can just be that much more engaged.
I really want to disappear, grow a beard, not talk to anyone, not make any friends... I just want to disappear and study.
I've always seen myself as a grown-up. Since I was a little kid.
I meditate an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. Once a year I go away for a long retreat. And overall, I just feel more comfortable in my own skin and less anxious, less sad, less fearful.
When you're starting out, you basically have all these assumptions about what it means to be an artist or how to be a rock star. It took me years, through trial and error, to figure out what does work for me. So much of it is counter to the myth of the rock-star life.
I guess I'm just a born performer or artist or sharer. I find the intimate details of my life compelling and interesting. I guess that I'm assuming that everyone else does, too.
I've tried every which way for writing lyrics - everything from using really bizarre imagery and metaphors, sort of obscuring the facts of what I'm singing about, all the way over to a song like 'Losing My Mind,' where you're just reading my thoughts as they're occurring.
I found that so many people in the music business started out as metalheads in the Eighties - whether they're songwriters, producers, engineers or executives, and no matter what they look like, with short hair, suits or whatever. I feel like my generation of metal kids really tends to populate the music world to a large extent.
Most people don't really need to hear a six-minute guitar solo that modulates between five keys and time signatures. What they want is a good song.
The bonds you make with those records when you're 14, 15 and 16, they'll never be broken, and nothing will ever be as strong as that.
I always loved the 'L.A. Weekly.' I totally looked up to it when Weezer was starting out, and I always wanted to be in it, and they always totally ignored us!
Being in Weezer's just gotten so much more fun over the years. I love almost every part of my job. My very favorite part is working on new songs.
The reason I started with prostitutes was solely to work on my negotiating skills. Once I mastered negotiating with naked women, dealing with Interscope was a piece of cake.Collection: Cake
It could appear that I'm some kind of natural genius, but it's just a million small lessons I've picked up over the years.Collection: Years
I have no interest in emo. I'm all about rap metal.Collection: Emo
I never feel guilty about liking music.Collection: Guilty
I think there is a very subtle shift from the metal I grew up on to Weezer. I think the big shift was from a minor key to a major key. That made a huge difference in how it was perceived.Collection: Thinking
It is cool to have a label head that is also a songwriter, in a band, and produces records.Collection: Labels
I find that I end up liking songs if I really have an idea of something I wat to write about-some problem in my life or something I want to work through; if I don't have something like that at the root of the song, then I think I end up not caring about it as much. I gravitate towards some kind of concept or idea or situation that I want to write about. Very often I have to write, rewrite and come at it from an opposite angle...and I end up writing the opposite song that I thought I was going to write.Collection: Song
Most of the songs I write just very directly from my life. I don't have a big imagination. Whenever I tried to write from fantasy, it comes out sounding really fake.Collection: Song
I enjoy listening to the albums of my youth as much as ever.Collection: Listening
If enough people out there want a physical product, I'll be happy to make one. I'd say about 10,000 people is "enough."Collection: People
I can't say I was consciously thinking of the big changes in the music business when I was writing the lyrics, but change, uncertainty, flux, impermanence - these are things I'm acutely aware of. And I enjoy facing it all.Collection: Writing
The internet has not granted us more control in relation to the record company because we're still bound by an agreement with them not to release our music without their consent. But they generally let us do what we want, anyway, so it doesn't matter who's officially in control.Collection: Agreement