Rivers Cuomo Quotes

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.

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!

I decided to try celibacy because I heard it would help the meditation, and I tried meditation because I heard it would help with the music. So, it all really comes back to the music.

I always like balance. If I'm playing rock music all the time, chances are I'll start craving some lighter, poppier stuff, both to listen to and to play. I compare music to massage. If someone's been working on your back for a long time, you really want them to move down to your legs or something.

I'm constantly fighting with my manager to reduce the amount of time I have to spend on promotional activities, so I can get back in the studio and work on new music.

I just went to the hobby shop and got an electricity kit and a chemistry kit, and I'm really excited to do experiments like squeezing an egg into a bottle and growing crystals. I'm really getting into hobbies.

With each step I take, I see that my ability to perform gets a little better. So until it starts getting worse, I'm going to keep moving forward.

At 18, I moved to L.A. with my heavy metal band Avant Garde, which was very much influenced by Metallica. At 19, I got a job at Tower Records, and everything started to change very quickly. I started listening to the Velvet Underground, Pixies, early Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and also earlier music like the Beatles.

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.

With no faith, purely as a scientific experiment, I started meditating and watched if it changed my music. It did, but it didn't make it more mellow. It made it easier to get into the flow of creativity.

Even at your best, the creative moments are still kind of fleeting.

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 have some good books of Bach keyboard music transcribed for guitar, and there's always a nylon-string guitar hanging on the wall in my house and a bunch of classical guitar books to grab. I kind of do that just for fun.

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 enjoy listening to the albums of my youth as much as ever.

I had rock-star dreams from 8 or 9 almost nonstop. I thought it was going to be like being a god on earth: having as many women as you want whenever you want them, having super powers, being incredibly wealthy, never doing laundry.

Now that I'm a father, I've forgiven my parents.

I feel so much feedback in a very profound way from the 10,000 people who are listening to me, watching me. I just get this deep sense of what works and what doesn't work.

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.

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.

People think I'm a freak or something, but I'm actually a really normal guy.

Cat Stevens' music, voice, and energy made me feel so secure. He sounded different from some of the paternal figures in my life, so gentle and kind.

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 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.

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.

I have no interest in emo. I'm all about rap metal.

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.

I'm just living each day, and I'm better equipped to do so. I mean, I used to be totally afraid, I used to have, like, permanent stage fright. But now I'm trying to have fun. I'm trying to bring as much happiness to as many people as possible.

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 always seen myself as a grown-up. Since I was a little kid.

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.

I just gotta keep reminding myself: Every time I do an interview or something, my volition really has to be just to serve, to help people. Not to feel like I'm important.

I never feel guilty about liking music.

I didn't get as much attention as I wanted from girls as a teenager. I thought that if I became a rock star, I would finally get all that I wanted - but it didn't happen.

I listen to music a lot on the treadmill - I would test 'Raditude' songs out on the treadmill.

I don't ever want anyone to think that I'm being judgmental. I gotta do everything I can do to not be preachy.

I think I'm a good dad. It's hard. Ultimately, it's our kids that have the final word. So we'll have to ask them.

I like to get input from all different kinds of listeners, including the really conservative ones, and sometimes those listeners steer me in a direction that I haven't seen. But at the end of the day, my vote is always to go in the direction that makes me the most excited.

Weezer isn't stuck in roles, so we just do what we want to do, what makes us excited.

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.

Rock and Roll Over' was the first Kiss album I heard, but I was totally oblivious to their whole image and the makeup and all that. I was so out of touch with the wider world.

What I am best at is reading a book and then writing a critical essay.

I've done a few things on the side here and there, but there is not much reason to do so in a sustained way. I'm generally able to say what I want to say within the context of Weezer.

'Easy' is not a word I would ever use to describe touring.

I'm often troubled by a very strong instinct to share everything that's going on with me. I want to feel that connection, even with people I don't know. Then this other voice says, 'That's not prudent. People will use what you've said to hurt you.'

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.

I've always thought of myself as so unsuited to be a frontman.

When I was 15 and dreaming about being a rock star ... I thought the whole point of it was to get chicks.

Most of the songs I write are 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.

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 don't need to suffer. I can really become a happy person and still make good music - in fact, better music.

It seems like Weezer has gotten better and better at getting attention for everything besides our music. Part of that is just the nature of our culture now - you really have to scream to get some attention, so people even know you have a record out that they might want to listen to.

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.