“Singing can be pretty rewarding even when you’re not that good at it.” – Matt Sharp, ‘Blue Album’ liner notes
Last National Poetry Month, we close read some poems. Recently, I’ve been looking at albums I loved in high school. The most recent crop of those turned a little shame-filled and maybe mean. So I thought it might be nice to close-read some songs I really like. Talk about why I think they are cool.
Breaking this into sub-categories—it worked at Cracked, it works for The Line Break, and it’s a good way to organize thoughts. Most chord progressions are four chords, so we’ll do four categories: general vibe, structure, chords, and moments of sublime. Those all make sense at face value right? Thanks, readers, I knew I could trust you.
First up was Chon. Then we did Polyphia. Then we did Elephant Gym. Now let’s do Weezer.
General Vibe
A wistfulness and longing for an alternate universe where this sort of early-Beatles-with-distortion-pedals, rock-sung-by-a-regular-guy-who-doesn’t-yarl, interesting-music-you-can-take-home-to-meet-your-parents carves out an actual niche among mainstream pop music. Do you know how happy I’d be if this type of stuff was playing over the speakers at Taco Bell while I was wiping down tables and sweeping up stray bean-lettuce instead of, like, Hinder?
That said, I suppose the “general vibe” section is the best place to talk about lyrics, which—I mean, you can hear that, right? The possessiveness, the violent misogyny behind the bubble gum chords and cheery BPM? My reading of this song has always been that it’s tongue-in-cheek, that it’s a caricature of how nasty jealousy makes you. Rivers has imitated that “The World Has Turned And Left Me Here,” the very next track on the album, is a sequel to this song. Guy is a jealous, possessive asshole, then his girlfriend leaves him. Why is he alone? Could it be that he turns everyone in his life off by being a jealous, possessive asshole? No, it’s the children who are wrong.
Rivers might be assuming more sophistication than his audience deserves: Wikipedia says we can’t be sure if this song sequence is related because the songs were written months apart from each other. As if the songwriter has a statute of limitations on emotions. As if thematic connections can’t be made intellectually.
Bad news for Brendan and me, since our upcoming album features a lot of things I was going through in like 2006-2012.
Wonder what Time Lord poet has to say about the statute of limitations on emotion.
Structure
There is a beauty to a basic pop structure. Seriously—sometimes songwriting is purely feel, sometimes writing to a set structure frees you from writer’s block. It’s like how you know a sonnet has 14 lines. If you know you’re writing a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus, well? The assignment’s just three parts. Wanna add a prechorus? A long outro? Go nuts! Long outros are great for lots of things!
This song is simple: quick intro-verse-prechorus-chorus-repeat all that-postchorus-guitar solo-modified prechorus-chorus-quick intro for an outro. We’re out in three minutes. Magic.
Chords
Look, the chords are the whole reason I wanted to do this thing. Listen to that verse progression! It’s an eight-bar prog with 11 changes, utilizing a ton of passing tones. Something I love that’s a little nerdy: the IV chord, typically your second home after the I (or root chord), is mostly used as a passing tone. We’re living in the crunchy liminal realm of the ii and iii chords a lot, especially when we get to that chord run at the end of the prechorus and the third time around on the chorus.
It never feels too far from pop, though—largely because of that nestled-by-the-fireplace I-V-vi-IV in the chorus. Hey, speaking of that chord progression, the legends at Secretly Incredibly Fascinating just did a whole episode on Pachelbel’s Canon, and that chord progression is like this one’s older brother. Anyway, the chorus feels safe, musically speaking, which lets the other parts of the song get a little rowdy, musically speaking. This is one of the best chord charts you will ever read, young guitarists and pianists, especially as you’re learning songwriting.
Moments of Sublime
Idk what else drummer Patrick Wilson could’ve played for that triplet intro. Actually, that’s not true—I can think of lots of fills he could’ve played. But he played the right one, here. Like his 60s counterpart, Ringo Starr, Patrick Wilson doesn’t get enough credit for doing all the right things.
The verse chord progression.
The falsetto background vocals. I miss when Matt Sharp was in Weezer.
Matt Sharp plays bass exactly right on this record and Pinkerton.
When Rivers hits that open low E string before ripping into the solo.
The guitar solo would not make my “top 10 weezer guitar solos” rejected pitch for WatchMojo, BUT is a master class is using multiple techniques to make an interesting pop guitar solo. My big gripe about Green Album is all the solos are just vocal melodies—an absolute affront to the songwriting and guitar gods. This one is almost a vocal melody, with flourishes and a mix of octave strumming and single-note lick-playing. This solo is the baseline from which all other Weezer solos should be judged.
I usually don’t care for when an obviously dubbed guitar solo rings out while the band keeps playing, but both in this version and the album version, the guitar that tracked the solo comes back in in a really interesting way. Listen to that stretch from 2:12-2:19—that’s smart lead playing.
Brian Bell’s bowling shirts during this era.
The end chorus, I love Rivers’ baritone belting.
WRAP IT UP B
This Rivers bit from the link above, which was too long for the epigraph, felt like life itself when I first read it at age 14 or whenever, and it doesn’t feel too far off from how I feel about life now:
“At 18, I freaked out and moved to Los Angeles to become a rock star. I soon realized that I was an idiot, and gave up. At the same time, my girlfriend broke up with me. I was really sad and started to write songs. Most of them sucked, but it became a habit that stuck with me. Because I’m so terrible at expressing my feelings directly, and because no one really cares, and because anything real is almost impossible to talk about, I’ve come to rely on music more and more to express myself.”
I’m glad Rivers became a rock star, because it means lots of people heard Blue Album and Pinkerton and Green Album and Maladroit. I’m bummed out Rivers became a rock star, because of everything that happened afterwards. Except for certain parts of Make Believe and Teal Album. Idk. Listen to Rivers’ episode of Song Exploder, it’s really useful in a ton of ways.
Meanwhile, this song rips.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris