Top 50 Rivers Cuomo Quotes

When ‘Nevermind’ came out, my roommate had the CD. At first, I actually thought, ‘This is too polished and commercial.’ It was a little off-putting. But then I was like, ‘This is the best music ever.’ It felt so close to what I wanted to do.

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 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.

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

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

I think if I wasn’t a musician, I would be a high-school band director or orchestra director. I like working with large groups of musicians and bringing out the dynamics and accomplishing something as a team.

I have a natural instinct to feel guilty and that I’ve let people down. I’ve apologized in more songs than ‘Back to the Shack.’ Going back to our second record, the closing lines are ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ It’s definitely part of my personality.

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.

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.

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

Miley Cyrus’ ‘Party in the USA’ kills me with jealousy. The melodies are out-of-control beautiful.

I listen to music a lot on the treadmill – I would test ‘Raditude’ songs out on the treadmill.

Nothing sounded as sincere as Nirvana’s music. It took a long time for me to accept that any other music could be good in other ways. Including my own.

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.

I can’t imagine Weezer stopping. We just love doing what we’re doing, and I think we’ll keep going until we fall down dead. Even if the audience is abandoning us, I can’t imagine doing anything else!

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.

In some ways, I feel like I was Nirvana’s biggest fan in the Nineties. I’m sure there are a zillion people who would make that claim, but I was just so passionately in love with the music that it made me feel sick. It made my heart hurt.

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

It’s so important to me that I feel like I’m doing something that’s never been done before, whether that’s in the show, or I’m writing a song. I can exist in this little box here, but I have to do something new with it.

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.

I do want to make music that people love, but I also want to make music that I love. I know I can’t please everyone with anything I do, so I don’t think too much about how other people are going to take things.

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.

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.

Rock guitar has been around for decades now, and there are so many strong traditions, and so much of it is just burned into my fingers. So, nine times out of 10, when I pick up the guitar to jam something, it sounds pretty cliche.

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 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.

I felt frustrated by the limitations of rock and the lifestyle of touring around on a bus and playing the same songs over and over. So I went back to school to study music, and one of the things I got into was the Italian opera composer Puccini.

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.

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.

I signed up for eHarmony once, and it took three hours to fill out that online form – so many personal questions. Then I clicked on submit, and instantaneously they responded and said, ‘We are sorry, but there is no one any where in the world that is appropriate for you.’ So that was it – I gave up.

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’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.

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

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

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 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!

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

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.

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.

The most nerve-wracking experience is an oral presentation in class. And right under that would be doing ‘Saturday Night Live’ or ‘David Letterman.’ One of those shows.

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’ve tried every which way for writing lyrics – everything from using really bizarre imagery and metaphors, sort of obscuring the facts of what I’m singing about, all the way over to a song like ‘Losing My Mind,’ where you’re just reading my thoughts as they’re occurring.

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 wouldn’t say that I relax and enjoy anything. But I think my pessimism helps. I never really expect anything good to happen, so when it does, it’s a nice surprise.

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 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.

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

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.