Song Exploder - Weezer - Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori

Episode Date: April 18, 2016

Weezer's 10th album, the self-titled "White" album, came out April 1, 2016. In this episode, Rivers Cuomo breaks down the meticulous process of making the song "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori," through the different demo versions that the track went through, and the array of spreadsheets that he uses collect, analyze, and harvest his ideas.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi-Kesh Hirway. Summer Elaine and Drunk Dory is a song on Weezer's 10th album, the self-titled White album, which came out on April 1, 2016. For this episode, I spoke to Weezer's frontman, Rivers Cuomo, at his home studio in Santa Monica. He showed me all the different demo versions that this song went through, as he detailed his meticulous process, which includes an array of spreadsheets that he uses

to collect, analyze, and harvest his ideas. My name is Rishi Kesh Your Way. You're listening to Song Exploder. My name is Rivers Cuomo. I play electric guitar, and I sing. One of the first things I did was I looked in my Spotify playlist that is a collection of songs I've heard that have cool chord progressions.

I'm going to go back and basically farm those songs for cool chord progressions. So I looked in there. and there's a song called Walk Away Renee by the Left Bank. And then I kind of go back and replay it like Weezer style with my distorted guitar. I noticed that the file name of this first demo that Rivers was playing was called Awaken Early. I asked him where that name came from. We want the identity of the original song to be obscured,

so I'm not influenced by it when I'm writing my own melody. yet we wanted the working title to resemble the original title so that if for some reason, say for example, we're on Song Exploder someday and we want to go back and find that original song, we can kind of make it out from the working title. We use an anagram generator online. So Walk Away, Renee, became awake and early. Now, when I come back looking for a chord progression to write over

some weeks later, I don't see the original name of the song, so I'm not reminded of the original tune. All I have to listen to is my distorted guitar playing this really beautiful chord progression. I don't remember where it came from. And then I'll do like just vocal improvisation over the guitar chords until I come up with a cool melody.

Just like singing and singing and scatting and searching for a melody that makes me feel great. You see all these walls are mirrored behind you so I can do all these creatures. crazy poses and stuff, but get in the mood. I always have to have, like, all the doors sealed up. I put a do not disturb sign out there. And there's, like, a lot of really embarrassing stuff on those recordings.

Sometimes I feel like on a piano or guitar, I can come up with melodies that. are even a little stronger, a little more dramatic and sometimes it's because on a piano you can play a melody that's harder to sing. So if you hear something, you can get it out on a big octave jump on the piano or something that your vocal muscles just might be a little too lazy to think of. I don't have a lot of facility on the piano, so I can kind of tell what melody I want to play, but I'm stumbling, playing a lot of wrong notes, feeling around for it. So now I got the melody. Core progression and melody for a chorus. And I'm reminded of a quote from Lady Gaga who said something like, when you're writing, just start with the chorus.

Because if the chorus isn't great, then you're screwed anyway. I have a spreadsheet of song titles, hundreds and hundreds of song titles. And I'm always adding to it. Sometimes it's a thought I have something I want to say that comes out as a song title or I hear somebody say something. And that's what happened in this case. It was the last day of school, last day of my daughter's second grade, they were having a party by a pool at one of the kids' house. And my daughter's teacher was there and she was drinking white wine and talking to some of the other moms there. She told the story that her husband has two names for her. There's the school year Elaine who's super stressed out and scary. And then there's Summer Elaine who's totally relaxed and fun. And this is the last day of school.

So she's turning into Summer Elaine. And then one of the other moms was there and said, oh yeah, my husband has two names for me, and the second one of which is drunk Dory, because when I drink, I'm tons of fun. So my songwriter radar started beeping like crazy, Summer Elaine and Drunk Dory. I put it in my phone and ended up in my spreadsheet. And then I open up this core progression and this melody that I love, and I look over my spreadsheet of song title ideas. First of all, I have to find one that's roughly the right number of syllables and with the right accents on the right syllables. And I identify those ones, and then I just start singing them

and seeing which ones have the right chemistry with the melody and the chord progression. Summer Elaine, it was a little bit of an awkward fit, and I was anxious about that at first because summer is strong weak, but the melody is like, bum-b-b-wke-strong, da-da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na.

So you can definitely get away with stuff like that, but at the very top of a chorus, the more natural it all flows usually the better. Then it becomes a singer's job to really make it feel natural and sell it and make it interesting. Okay, so I have another spreadsheet of lines, things I want to say, or things I've read in a book or heard on a TV show. show or a movie. A lot of it is taken right out of my journals. I do stream of consciousness in the morning for 25 minutes. I started in 2010 after reading The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. It's called Morning Pages, which is basically stream of consciousness. So yeah, that's been great. And then I come back

at a later time, maybe the next day with a highlighter, totally detached. I don't really care what I was talking about. I just look for really cool lines. I highlight those. Then they end up in the spreadsheet. But But that doesn't mean they're going to end up in a song. It just means I think it's a cool line and it gets in the spreadsheet. So then there's a couple thousand lines. Right now I have them all tagged by how many syllable each line has. If it's accented or unaccented to start or the last two syllables also, is it strong week or weak strong, that sort of thing.

Everything's tagged and searchable. So I knew I had this melody. Oh, she left me here. So one, two, three, four, five. strong weak strong so I can search for lyrics that have five syllables and start with an accent She was out too deep

Oh she swam away So then the answer phrase is six syllables So I made a long list of lines that would fit there When lightning struck the bay She left me all It sounds like something happened in my life, and then I observed it, and then I wrote a song about it, and it's coherent. There's a beginning, middle, and end. And that's totally not the case at all.

Each line is from a completely different place, and I just reassembled them in some order that suggests a story that never happened. It's a crazy way to write. This is the way I came up with a guitar solo. Instead of playing the guitar, I sing. Before I said, I come up with a lot of my vocal melodies on the piano or the guitar, the reverse is also true. If I just go to play a solo on a guitar, often it turns into just a wank fest and, you know,

like the same old muscle memory licks you've heard a zillion times, and it's not interesting. But if I sing it, I'm much more restricted in where I can go and how fast the solo will be. And it's going to have space in it because I have to breathe and it's going to be something you can sing along to

because it was created by a voice. But guitar can go a lot higher than my voice. So when I originally scat the solo, it's in a lower octave. And then I go back and pitch it up an octave because I need to learn it on guitar. So I need to hear it in that higher octave. Yeah, and again, it's like I have all the doors closed

and I'm, you know, it's like 100 degrees in here in the summer. There's no AC, shirts off, like jumping around, air guitar. So Rivers had come up with all the melodies and the words for the song, but there was a problem. The verse melody was pretty low for his voice. I don't have, like, a range that's compelling, low or super high. There's, like, the sweet spot where I'm really trying and it sounds good, but it's actually a pretty small range, so it gets tricky. so this is the solution.

Key change. It seemed totally absurd. Like you can't do that. I associate key modulations in and out of choruses with the 1980s, the pop music that was around when I was a teenager. And it just seems totally forbidden for a 90s alt rock band to do that kind of trickery. Because so often it's used to create some kind of emotion

in a really insincere way. But then we tried it in the room on acoustic guitar, and it was like, yeah, that's really cool. And in a way, it sounds kind of familiar for Weezer, too. I just really love that compositional moment into the chorus and then into the second verse, into the second chorus, and there's all these key changes. And, man, I never get to do that.

So it's really nice. Brian Bell plays electric guitar and he does backup vocals, Scott Triner's bass and backup vocals, and Pat Wilson is the drummer. I really appreciate the power of democracy. The songwriter, in this case me, with the best of intentions,

can limit the creativity of the other members of the band because you're attached to your original demo or you had this vision for how you thought it was going to go, and in any case you're just one brain and you just have this one limited perspective but politically in the room you have more power than everyone else even with the best of intentions other people are going to think like

well I guess he wrote the song so if he doesn't like what I'm doing then maybe I shouldn't do it so it's very helpful for those guys to get time in the studio with our producer Jake Jake Sinclair without me to come up with their own parts and I don't hear it until they're done with their parts. Then I get to listen back and in most cases I'm just blown away by how cool and fresh and layered and complex everything has become.

Jake has worked with each of the four guys separately recording their parts really crafting them so they all interlocked just perfectly and it's all very carefully thought through. And what we have, is a pretty great recording. What it is lacking is that feeling of spontaneity and background chatter and just off-the-cuff ideas that you get when you have four guys jamming in a room. So we do at least a few takes where it's me, Scott, and Brian all standing around a mic or several mics. And we just do a

couple passes through the song where, you know, you can do whatever you want. Crazy sounds, hip-hop ad-libbing, course, harmonies, anything that comes to your mind. And we end up with many tracks of all this crazy stuff. I got to admit, Brian's pretty awesome with these freaky ad libs. Come back to me. If somebody asked me what the song was about, I would say I'm trying to write songs that I don't understand. So if I could answer that question and tell you what it was about, then I failed as a songwriter. I want to enjoy my own songs, and once I feel like I totally understand a song and there's no mystery there, then I can't really enjoy it anymore.

So I like to create these enigmatic three-minute adventures that have me scratching my head for years. And now here's Summer Lane and Drunk Dory by Weezer in its entire. Visit SongExploder.net for more on Weezer and their white album, as well as links to Walk Away by the Left Bank and the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way.

I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career, and then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations. conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Robe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings,

John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website. rishikash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can find all the past and future episodes of songexploder at songexploder.net or on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. Find the show at Song Exploder on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Production assistance on this episode by Eric Bass. Song Exploder is a proud member of the Radiotopia Network from PRX, made possible by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. Next time on Song Exploder, The Lumineers. My name is Rishi Kesh Your Way. Thanks for listening. I, when I was young, I should have known better, and I can't feel no...