To call Rivers Cuomo a prolific songwriter in an understatement. To throw some figures at you number-crunchers, my iPod holds 357 Weezer songs – 55 of which make up their studio albums. So the other 302? Unreleased demos. And plenty of them.
Previously available only from super-anal Weezer fans, long-forgotten FTP servers or Rivers himself (under the KISS-lovin’ guise of ‘Ace’ in the old school Weezer forums), Geffen will be releasing the official compilation Alone – The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo on December 11, presumably packed with more acoustic lo-fi demo goodness than you could point a stick at. What’s more interesting is that at one stage the demo compilation was to be released with a book penned by Cuomo himself. From River’s MySpace blog:
After many intense conversations with book publishers and record company people, I’ve decided to split my CD/book project in two. Ultimately, I feel that the music and the literary materials will be better served if developed and presented separately.
The book is now going to come out at a much later date—a year? Two years? Three years? I don’t know. It’s going to be very cool, though. I’m digging what I’ve already got (nearly 400 pages) and I’m enjoying the process of writing and researching.
Could this mystery book be an abridged version of Rivers’ infamous Encyclopedia of Pop? The three-ring binder the songwriter developed and lived by, which broke down the mechanics of pop and rock songs by popular artists like Nirvana, Green Day and Oasis? And what tunes will be found on the Alone compilation? Surely there’s stuff in a vault somewhere that no one has heard (I’m looking at you Songs From The Black Hole era). Only time will tell my friends, so tune in at the same Bat-time, same Bat-channel, for more Weezer news as it breaks.
How many of those 302 songs are poorly recorded Japanese bootlegs?
Wow, a few big posts for Angus “time on his hands” Truskstein.