← Ongoing History of New Music
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- [00:00]
Alan Cross
Hey, it's Alan and I just wanted.
- [00:02]
Nadia
To let you know that you can.
- [00:03]
Alan Cross
Now listen to the ongoing history of.
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Nadia
New music early and ad free on Amazon Music included with Prime.
- [00:09]
Unknown
Welcome to Nadia Yada island, next on.
- [00:13]
Alan Cross
Metro's Nadia Yada island podcast. I almost fainted when the four new bombshells arrived. Four free Samsung Galaxy A16 5G phones at Metro. No way. And finding out the fourth line is free. Thanks God Heated. That's wild. Join Metro and get four free Samsung.
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Unknown
5G phones only at Metro.
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Metro plus tax. Bring four numbers and an ID and.
- [00:34]
Alan Cross
Sign up for any Metro Flex plan.
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Unknown
Not available currently AT T Mobile or Vivid.
- [00:37]
Alan Cross
Metro in the past 180 days the way I see it, there are three types of bands that stretch across a spectrum. First, there's the extreme sort, a group that will do almost anything to attract attention. You're probably thinking of some names right now. Next to them are the traditional sort, and they comprise the vast majority of bands out there. These are groups that will go out and do their thing earnestly and honestly and hope that there will be enough for music lovers. And they occupy a huge part of this spectrum. And then we have the third type, the quirky, eccentric and weird. These groups come in all sorts of flavors, from mildly bent to the gloriously stupid and the confoundingly weird. These bands go a long way into making music fun and unpredictable. Now, not all land with audiences. They're just too strange. Not enough people get the joke. Or maybe they're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there can be this balance between being quirky and fun and having songs that have widespread appeal. They have just enough of the nerd factor to set themselves apart while not being so nerdy that they'll turn people off. Now this is really hard to do. It takes songwriting skills, careful management of your image, and plenty of creativity and imagination, especially if you want to maintain things over just a couple of albums and touring cycles. And among the very, very, very, very best of this class is Weezer. They have perfected a formula that includes musical talent, wit, self deprecation, left of center thinking, a desire to have fun, a willingness to experiment, some very clever marketing, and above all time, let their fans in on everything. It is an approach that has worked very, very well for decades. This is part two of Rivers Cuomo and Weezer, alt rock's Nerd heroes. This is the ongoing history of New music podcast with Alan Cross.
- [02:43]
Unknown
That's Where I Want to Be.
- [02:56]
Alan Cross
Weezer from their fifth album, Make Believe in 2005. And yes, that is a slightly different mix than the final version. It's a demo. I figured that since we're all familiar enough with the hit single version, why not do something like that? Demos like that were widely shared by Weezer with fans through their website. Something that was pretty novel for 2005. Rivers Cuomo came up with the idea for this song after attending the opening of a new phase of the Hollywood Bowl. There had been some renovations or something. Flipping through the program, he saw pictures of the girl group Wilson Phillips. Remember them? All members were daughters of the Beach Boys and the Mamas and Papas. And he thought, hmm, I wonder what it would be like to marry an established, successful celebrity. He first approached the song quite seriously. Early demos had a swing beat, but by the time the song was done, it turned out sarcastically with a chunky rhythm. It was also the first Weezer song to use a talk box on a guitar. The gimme gimme background vocals in the finished version are by someone named Stephanie Eitel of a group called Agent Sparks. The video was filmed in a bunch of Weezer fans at the Playboy Mansion, which, by the way, is not in Beverly Hills, but in nearby Holmby Hills. And the single got them their first ever Grammy nomination. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross, and on part one of this look at Rivers and Weezer, we went through some deep background in their early years. This time we're gonna kind of hop through their career as an established band, stopping on some of the more interesting and creative things that they've done, while managing to sell somewhere around 35 million albums worldwide. Make Believe was a very big album for the band, selling somewhere around 2 million copies. Not bad in the age of music piracy and file sharing. However, after this album cycle was completed, there were rumors that Weezer was breaking up, and you can actually see why. Rivers returned to Harvard to finish his degree in English. He got married to Kyoto Ito on June 18, 2006. They'd first met in 1997, and they were married on a remote beach near Malibu. Then they went off to a honeymoon in Japan. Drummer Patrick Wilson and bass player Scott Shriner went to work on a group called the Relationship. Brian Bell had his side project, the Special Goodness. Pat and Brian also got into acting in a film called Factory Girl. Pat got to be John Cale of the Velvet Underground, while Brian played Andy Warhol. And it didn't help that Rivers said this in an interview. Really, for the moment, we are done, and I'm not certain we'll ever make a record Again, unless it becomes really obvious to me that we need to do one now. Mind you, this interview was conducted while he was on his honeymoon and he didn't like being interrupted, so he was a little annoyed. But when no Weezer album appeared in 2006 or 2007, fans suspected the worst. But then some clues started appearing online. A demo called Pig was leaked and then deleted. Digging into the metadata, it appeared that Pig was a song from something called Deliverance Is At Hand. Another clue appeared in the form of a mysterious website not affiliated with weezer called Album 6, which directed fans to the official Weezer website. Then it started promoting an album called Toute Ensemble, which turned out to be fake. It also turned out that Deliverance Is At Hand was a real thing, but featured the more experimental side of Weezer. Not only was everyone in the band contributing songs, but river was trying to get away from the traditional verse, chorus, verse way of writing material. In the months leading up to its release, the Weezer Zone was flooded with fake news and all kinds of disinformation. There were rumors and leaks and bogus lyrics. Posted eight tracks from the album, the real album were leaked, which actually forced the label's hand. It had to move up the release date of the album. I flew to LA to talk to the band about the record.
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Rivers Cuomo
My favorite source of inspiration is my own life and my own feelings. And my songs in this album came from my life. Sometimes I have to change some details or use a little artistry here and there to make it more something that people can relate to. But it all starts with something in my life. Pat, Brian and Scott wrote songs in this album too, so I can't speak for them. Scott, do you have something to say? The music that I wrote was just based on feeling.
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Alan Cross
You wrote the lyrics for it. That's not so much I autobiographical, but yeah, I write from my own experience as well.
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Rivers Cuomo
In the Greatest man that Ever Lived. Towards the end of the song, there's this vocal breakdown where it goes into this three part counterpoint. It almost sounds like Renaissance vocal polyphony. And I learned how to do that sort of thing from studying music theory and composition.
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Alan Cross
Renaissance vocal polyphony?
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Rivers Cuomo
Yeah, it's quite literally in the style of 17th century or 16th century counterpoint, but I just love the sound of that. It's so beautiful and so stimulating to my brain to hear all these different voices interweaving. They all sound independent and unique, but they work together so well. I'd have no idea how to do that if I hadn't studied it some.
- [07:59]
Alan Cross
You don't hear that kind of stuff happening a whole lot in rock and pop music these days.
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Rivers Cuomo
Not really intense vocal polyphony, but, you know, the best pop music has always had a really good sense of counterpoint between the bass line and the melody. Having those two things be independent and moving in different directions and pop, but still complimenting each other.
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Alan Cross
Pork and Beans is a cool song. At the radio station, we instantly liked it the moment we heard it. A little quirky. What's that chipmunk sort of sound?
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Rivers Cuomo
That's actually me saying, I think I'm just saying hey. And then I sped it up an octave and it sounds like a chipmunk. It actually sounds like a Timbaland type of production. He has little baby crying type of sounds. That sort of thing makes sense with.
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Alan Cross
You name checking him.
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Rivers Cuomo
Yeah.
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Unknown
Imma do the things that I wanna do I ain't got a thing to prove to you I need my candy with the pork and beans Excuse my.
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Alan Cross
Love the video for that song too. It featured appearances by the biggest Internet stars of the day, ranging from the dramatic Chipmunk to the Leave Britney Alone guy to Tay Zonday, the singer of Chocolate Rain. Very clever, very fun, very of the moment. They captured the zeitgeist with that one. The sixth Weezer album did not have a title. We had the blue album in 1994, the green album in 2001. And since this record was red, well, it's the Red Album. It came in a couple of different versions. Now imagine my surprise when I opened my copy, my CD copy, and saw that my interview with the band had been incorporated into the liner notes. I guess I must have signed some kind of waiver that allowed them to do that, but all right, but, you know, whatever kind of cool. The Red Album marked the beginning of a very prolific period for the band. A little more than a year later, we got Ratitude, a title suggested to Rivers by Rainn Wilson, the actor. A couple of things about that album. The dog on the COVID is named Sydney. That photo was found in a copy of national geographic published in August 2009, about two months before the album came out. Rivers really liked the picture, so he contacted the Dog's Human in Connecticut, got permission to use the picture, and we got Sidney on the COVID Pat Wilson moved from drums to guitar for this record, taking over from Rivers. For Drums, they hired journeyman Josh Freese. For the first time, outside collaborators were brought in, including Jermaine Dupree, a couple of guys from All American Rejects. Lil Wayne, Dan Wilson from Semisonic, and the guys from Sloan. Now, they're not credited and their parts were recorded in 2003, but they are here. There were also four producers for this record, including Dr. Luke and Jackknife Lee. Five producers, if you want to count Rivers. Why so many cooks in the kitchen? Well, because Rivers wanted to experiment. As he told the other guys, this is just one more album out of many more that we're going to make. So in other words, if it works out, great. If it doesn't, fine. We'll do something different for the next album. Let's get into a song from that record. Ungainly title, if you're wondering if I want to, I want to, but it did well on alt rock radio that Fall and Winter Speaking of fall and winter, this was also when Weezer released one of the most famous pieces of merch. It was the Weezer Snuggie. You know those blankets with the sleeves that were advertised on late night tv? The band even showed up on David Letterman wearing some. And of course there was a Weezer TV commercial for the Snuggie.
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Unknown
You want to keep warm when you're feeling chilled. Blankets are okay, but they can slip and slide. And when you need to reach for something, your hands are trapped inside. Now there's the Weezer Snuggie, the blanket that has sleeves. The Weezer Snuggie keeps you totally warm and gives you the freedom to use your hands. Call now and you'll get the ultra soft Weezer snuggie for only $29.99. As an added bonus, you'll also receive Ratitude, the brand new CD from Weezer. Vote for only $29.99. Call now.
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Alan Cross
Next up was the 2010 album entitled Hurley, named after the character in the TV series Lost. That's Jorge Garcia, the guy who played Hurley on the show on the COVID And it's a crop picture of Rivers hugging Garcia in the green room of Lopez Tonight, the late night talk show hosted by comedian George Lopez. They were both on the same episode at first. This was going to be another self titled album released in another color like the blue, green and Red albums. And technically this album also doesn't have a title, so fans just refer to it as Hurley. Now speaking of fans, here is another example of how much Weezer involves them. And it was another experiment using the Internet in the way few artists had thought of. To promote the album on YouTube, the band gave 15amateur online creators to come up with something interesting in 30 minutes. And they called this promotion the YouTube Invasion. This is from somebody named Hot for Words.
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Unknown
Hello, my dear students. With Weezer bringing their new album out called Hurley, I decided to do the origins of the words whizzer and Hurley. Now, whizzer comes from the old Norse whizzer, and it means someone who wheezes. You know when you're really sick and you start coughing and you make that whistling sound from your throat? Yeah, it's onomatopoietic. It sounds like what it means. And when you're really sick and you feel like throwing up, well, that's where Hurley comes from. From Hurl. You know, when you hurl, you throw up.
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Alan Cross
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
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Unknown
Hold on, hold on. That's not right.
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Rivers Cuomo
That's not right at all.
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Unknown
What, you think you can do better job than me? I'm the teacher.
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Rivers Cuomo
Excuse me, Hot. Hello, my dear students. We just thought Weezer was a cool sounding word, and Hurley is a cool sounding word.
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Unknown
Guys, guys, this is. This is not good. It's detention for you all, okay? Go, go, go.
- [14:28]
Alan Cross
Get.
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Unknown
Get out, get out, get out. Naming the band and album afterwards that you thought were cool. Right? On the other hand, Marina would be a good name for the album. Hey, guys, I have an idea.
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Alan Cross
Here's a single from Hurley. It's called Memories. And in a bit of cross marketing, it was also used to promote the movie Jackass 3D. Cast members sing in the background, and the video was shot using old Super 8 cameras.
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Unknown
Memories make me want to go back back.
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Alan Cross
Weezer and Memories from the Hurley album, the only Weezer album to be released on Epitaph Records. For the next record, they were back on Geffen. But it wasn't exactly new. It was a compilation of odds and ends. In fact, odds and Ends was the working title, featuring previously unreleased tracks. People have been asking for a box set of unreleased material from Weezer, but that seemed like too much work at the time, so instead we ended up getting death to false metal. Now to the band. This is officially their ninth album, although most of the attention upon its release was directed towards a reissue of Pinkerton, which came out at the same time. Pinkerton, of course, being the second album. And by now Pinkerton was getting the recognition and praise that escaped it when it was first released in 1996. To me, the most interesting track on this album is the first song. It's called Turning up the Radio, and it's the result of fans submitting ideas for a new song. Anyone could participate. Song titles, chord progressions, lyrics melodies. It was all done through sharing material through YouTube videos. The project was called let's Write a Song and song is spelled S A W N G in this particular case. Again, very creative, very interactive and very fan friendly. In the end, the ideas of 16 people plus rivers were used. And here's what that big collaboration sounded like.
- [16:41]
Unknown
Let the good times roll we don't care what you say we're turning up the radio Turn.
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Alan Cross
Turning out the radio collaboration between Weezer and 16 fans for their 2010 collection Death to False Metal. The COVID artwork, by the way, was inspired by a Jehovah's Witness pamphlet that Rivers had been hanging onto since the days of the Red album. We still have a lot to get through, including more of Weezer's wacky promo ideas. And there are plenty more music stories too. Hang on. This is part two of an episode I call Rivers, Cuomo and Weezer Alt rock's Nerd heroes, and the purpose is to show exactly how different Weezer is from your typical rock band. Weezer took a four year break from making proper records. Hurley came out in September 2010 and the next record wouldn't arrive until October 2014, and they called it Everything Will Be All Right in the End. And I know that Death to False Metal is considered by the band to be their ninth album, but come on, this is really album number nine. This was the third and last album to be produced by Rick Ocasek of the Cars before he died. He'd done the Blue and Green albums previously and was hired this last time, and Ocasek took Weezer's sound back to those early days. The album was supposed to be ready for 2011, but a few things intervened. Over 200 songs were written and considered for the album. You gotta sort through all those. 20 were recorded and about a dozen were selected. So again, going through all that material was one thing. Secondly, the bus accident. On December 6, 2009, Weezer was on tour for the Ratitude album. They had just played a show in Toronto and were headed back into the States when they got on the New York State Thruway near the town of Glenn. The bus hit a patch of ice, went over the median, hit some posts, crossed back over the highway, jumped the guardrail and finally came to rest in the ditch. Rivers, his wife Kyoko, his daughter Mia, their nanny and their assistant Sarah were all on that bus. Rivers took a real beating. Three cracked ribs and some internal bleeding. Well, that was enough touring and the rest of the dates were canceled. On October 8, 2011, former bass player Mikey Welsh was found dead of an overdose in a Chicago hotel room. After that, Rivers lost his grandfather, a former girlfriend and his meditation teacher. He and Kyoko also had a son, Leo, in 2012, but his birth was difficult. Rivers decided that things needed to slow down after releasing three albums in three years. Of course, all this other stuff was going on, he says. His meditation also gave him the concept for what he wanted to be a classic, complex album. So putting things together took a while, and not just because 200 songs were considered. The band once again turned to their fans, holding focus groups to listen to demos and songs that were still works in progress. Their feedback was incorporated into the final product. I can't think of another band that's ever done that. The album can be divided into three the Panopticon Artist, which looks at the relationship between Weezer and their fans Belladonna, which Rivers considers to be the classic girl group songs of the album and Patriarchia, songs about father figures. The last theme is important because after decades, Rivers finally reconciled with his birth father, the guy who left the family in 1975 and became a Pentecostal minister. Rick Ocasek insisted on using the same guitars as the band had on the Blue record. Its release was promoted with 24 videos on YouTube. And to take a break, the band embarked on two Weezer cruises, one in 2012 and another in 2014, both through the Caribbean, with Carnival cruises featuring hundreds and hundreds of fans on board. On the second cruise, the first single for the new album was debuted at a party on Nassau. It was called Back to the Shack. One more note about the Everything Will Be alright in the End album, Weezer released a version on cassette, making them one of the very few bands to predict that cassettes would eventually become kind of a thing again. At least when it comes to collectibles in the world of hardcore fans, this might be a good time to go back and talk about Rivers love of meditation. It's called Vispasana. That's Sanskrit for to see things as they are. And this technique has been around for at least 2,500 years. Rivers practices this at least two hours a day. It was producer Rick Rubin who first suggested this in about 2003, when Weezer was working on the Red album. At first, Weezer wasn't crazy about the idea because he thought meditation would calm him down too much and then rob him of the angst he felt he needed that was so important to his songwriting. But eventually he gave it a go and found that he really enjoyed it and realized that meditation could actually take his creativity to a whole new level, he says. It has made him calm, stable, and this is a, quote, 10% happier. Weezer's 10th album went back to using colors. With apologies to the Beatles, their White album came out on April Fool's Day 2016. Everything will be All Right in the End wasn't exactly a sales success, despite some good reviews. So it was time to experiment again. There was a new producer named Jack Sinclair, who was a longtime Weezer fan who also fronted a band called Wannabezer. This gave him some really crazy insights as to how the band should sound. Brian Bell would later say that he knew more about the band's sound than the band did. The first thing Jack did was sort through about 250 songs that rivers presented to him. Of all those tracks, exactly one would make the album now. First of all, how does someone write so many songs? Well, Rivers says he's all about stream of consciousness. He just lets the ideas flow. Most will be garbage, but there will be some gems in there. He also came up with a new technique. Rivers signed up for a Tinder account, and he met with people and then wrote about those experiences. Because he was living in California, these meetups coalesced into themes about the beach and the ocean. He wrote about surfers, beach bums, Hare Krishnas, a Sikh on roller skates who hung out at Venice beach, and stuff like that. The songwriting process was also different. Rivers began by creating Spotify playlists featuring songs with chord progressions that he found interesting. Melodies were written on a piano. Guitar solos were sounded out vocally first. Lyrical thoughts were stored in a journal with the best bits making it onto a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet was then organized by the number of syllables in each line and something called the strong, weak emphasis. That's basically which part of the word receives the most emphasis versus the other parts of the word. And that's something he must have learned through his English degree from Harvard. He then order the data in the spreadsheet in ways where certain lines fit certain melodies, and then those lines were again ordered to tell some kind of story. Yeah, I know it's complicated. Here's a song from the White Album that was written with the help of an Excel spreadsheet. It's called California Kids.
- [24:14]
Unknown
Be All Right. If you're on a sinking ship the California kids will throw you a lifeline and if you're up all night thinking about something you did.
- [24:32]
Alan Cross
The White Album brought Weezer some very good reviews and another Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album. Weezer went back to their prolific ways. After this, they were supposed to follow up the White Album with the Black Album, but that didn't happen. If one was light, the next one was supposed to be dark. That's Weezer's thinking. But what they ended up with from Rivers endlessly deep folders of song ideas were songs that weren't dark enough. So they had no choice but to put the Black Album on hold. What we got instead was Pacific Daydream. Again, Rivers used the spreadsheet technique, only this time he hired some programmers to organize the data in an even more granular way, tagging everything with specific attributes. One tab contained about 5,500 lyrical fragments that he thought were really cool. This way, whenever he got stuck, he just went to the spreadsheet to search and sort until he found combinations that worked. There were usually 10 or 15 to choose from. Rivers then worked with those until he found something that worked as a song. In case you're wondering, the programmers did everything in Python. It does sound weird, it does sound confusing and certainly overly complicated, but it worked. Pacific Dream got good reviews and also got the band another Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album. Here's one of those singles. It's called Feels Like Summer. We're not done yet. With looking at the quirkiness that is Weezer, we'll finish things up with a few more things that makes the band unlike any other. In just a moment. Weezer has maintained a pretty furious pace when it comes to releasing new material. In fact, some people say that they're, well, maybe a little too prolific. Maybe they say the band should just slow down, spend more time contemplating songs and relaxing just a bit before jumping to the next project. Maybe there's too much Weezer out there, which dilutes things for some fans. Well, no, Weezer keeps moving ahead. After the Pacific dream album in 2018 came another colored album, the Teal Album, and it showed up in January 2019 with no warning whatsoever. It just appeared as a digital release as a surprise, and it featured nothing but covers. Weezer didn't just, of course, pick their favorite songs. Rivers wrote a computer program that sucked in all kinds of Spotify data. He then looked at all the popular songs that weren't tagged as alt rock or classic rock, and then he narrowed down the list to songs released before 1994. The report generated 200 titles, and then the band set about learning to play the top 10 songs as accurately as possible and as true to the original as they could. Now, I should point out that there's one exception to this 1994 rule, which was TLC's no Scrubs. It made the cut because the band decided that it was. Well, it was just cool. That's it. So Tears for Fears, Eurythmics, Aha, Black Sabbath, ELO and Michael Jackson were all saluted on the album. The song that got the most attention was Weezer's version of Africa, the Toto hit from 1982. Great story here. It grew out of a request, well, actually more of a demand from a 14 year old fan in Cleveland named Mary Kim. She tweeted at the band, it's about time you bless the rains down in Africa. There was some back and forth, but then that resulted in a cover of Rosanna, another toto song. That, however, was not the end of it. Weezer did record Africa and they did a great job too, although I don't remember Weird Al being in the original. Back in the early 80s, the Weezer version came out digitally and as a limited edition 7 inch single.
- [28:40]
Unknown
You.
- [28:54]
Alan Cross
See what I mean? That's. That's pretty accurate. Once the Teal album had its run, which was all two months, it was finally time for the Black album. This was officially studio album number 15. And again, Weezer had some fun with the Internet. On October 9, 2018, a Yelp profile appeared and was shared by the official Weezer Twitter account. All the reviews contained some kind of unknown lyrics, and all the reviews were of places with the word black in their name. And then on October 11, 2018, a new song was released. It featured those mysterious lyrics in the Yelp reviews and it was called Can't Knock the Hustle.
- [29:36]
Unknown
Can't knock the Hustle, can knock the hustle.
- [29:55]
Alan Cross
On January 29, 2021, Weezer issued okay Human, another studio record. And yes, the title is in response to Radiohead's OK Computer. Naturally, there was some kind of fun marketing campaign to go along with the album's release. And this time, Weezer hooked up with the people who made the Roomba robot vacuum. This Roomba was spelled with a silent W at the beginning. And there was a contest where you could win one of five Weezer roombas. It was announced with a social media campaign that began with the message. Studies show that nine out of 10 humans have dreamed of Weezer cleaning their house. And then there was 2019's Van Weezer album, Remember How Rivers was in a metal band before Weezer? This was a return to that time, sort of. It was definitely heavier than past Weezer records, but in a Weezer way, of course. Here's another quirky thing I want to mention. We've heard how Weezer has a thing for spreadsheets. Okay, Rivers has a thing for spreadsheets. He also has these bespoke computer programs to help with his songwriting. After getting people to write programs for him, he then decided to use part of the Pandemic lockdown. Learning to code himself, he created something called the Riverpedia, which is now known as the Library. This began as a homework assignment and was Posted online on August 18, 2020. And here's the pitch.
- [31:36]
Unknown
Hi, I'm Rivers from the band Weezer. Imagine you're on tour and you're sitting in your dressing room or on your tour bus. You're backstage, you have stage fright, you're stressing out, you're pacing back and forth. And then on top of that, your tour manager is constantly calling you and asking you logistical questions.
- [31:57]
Alan Cross
What time do you want to get to the venue tomorrow? What time do you want to hit the road tomorrow night? After the show's over, what time do you want the plane to take off?
- [32:03]
Unknown
Multiply that by 50 shows or 100 shows or however many shows you have to play on this tour. That's a lot of thinking and decision making. Wouldn't it be nice if you could have all of that worked out for you so you could just sit back in your tour bus and watch the Haunting of Hill House? Well, now you can, with my new app called Drive Times. Let's check it out. Here is the routing we got from Weezer's agent, William Morris Endeavor Agency. And this is our spring tour next spring with the Pixies, starting in Louisville and ending up in. And it has all these shows and all our hotels. And so there's a lot of drives that need to be planned. It also has a few private plane flights that need to be scheduled. So this program is going to do all that for us. Here is the calendar that's saved, but that's shared by the band and the tour manager, manager, assistant, etc. Weezer, obviously there's nothing in it. It's not doing anybody any good. So let's fill it up right now by running Drive Times.
- [33:25]
Alan Cross
In case you're wondering, river's got a 95 in his coding class. He's also a pretty fair Python programmer. Now, Weezer has been around for such a long time and has really so much material that I just don't have enough time to cover all their music. For example, there was the seasons project, new EPs released on the first days of spring, summer, fall and winter of 2022. There are all the guest appearances and writing credits on records by AWOL Nation, Billy Talent, Todd Rundgren, Panic at the Disco, and even the Muppets. I counted about three dozen of these collaborative songs and of course there are hundreds. Well, probably thousands. Literally thousands of demos that Rivers Cuomo has either posted online or released on compilations. Some of this music dates back as far as 1979. If you're a Weezer fan, you'll know this already. There is no end to the number of rabbit holes that exist about this group and once you get started, you will be busy for a long, long time. If you want more programs like this, there are hundreds of ongoing history episodes available as podcasts. They're available on all the platforms and new shows appear every week. And if you like true crime with your music, there's my other podcast, Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. New episodes appear every two weeks. I'm on all the social media platforms, shouldn't be that hard to find. A good place to start is my website, ajournalofmusicalthings.com, which is updated daily and comes with a free daily newsletter. And should you have any questions, comments, critiques, corrections or complaints, use AllenellEncross Cat Technical Productions by Rob Johnston. Talk to you next time. I'm Alan Cross.
- [35:02]
Nadia
February is Black History Month and as someone who is interested in all forms and fashions of music history, I'm looking forward to a new series on the History Channel entitled Sounds Black. There have been a lot of programs on Black music in America, but this series is different. The four one hour episodes look at the origins and impact of Black music in Canada and this is something that I think we've needed for a long time. What can we expect? Well, stories of black artists coming north, not just from the U.S. but places like Jamaica and other places in the West Indies. It involves jazz and gospel and the fight for black artists to be heard and seen by mainstream audiences. And eventually we get to today with hip hop, rap and R and B stars like the Weeknd and Drake. The show features contributions from Maestro Fresh West, Julie Black, Michi Me Rascals, Choclair, Fifi Dobson, Deborah Cox, Keesh, Ashante, Cardinal Official and other stars from the Canadian scene. Sounds Black, a limited series on the History Channel, Stream on Stack TV.