Did you know that Rivers Cuomo once recorded a rap album about — wait for it! — vegetarianism?
Sound strange? You'll want to keep watching to learn more about Weezer's famous frontman.
Rivers Cuomo and his brother Leaves had a unique childhood. According to Cuomo's
official biography, the two boys were raised on an ashram known as "Yogaville,"
located in Pomfret, Connecticut. Cuomo elaborated on his upbringing
in an interview with Integral Yoga Magazine. He recalled his time at the ashram school,
which he attended from age 4 to 7, fondly, telling the outlet:
"The Ashram itself was so nurturing and creative.
I just remember being in school and feeling that if I had any crazy idea,
we would be encouraged to try it out. You want to build a space ship? Sure, let's try and build it."
He speculates that the ashram's constructive approach to education
is part of the reason why so many former Yogaville children have gone on to have
successful careers in the arts. For instance, award-winning actor Liev Schrieber attended
the ashram school, as did Dave Matthews Band member Stefan Lessard.
It's possible that musical talent runs in Rivers Cuomo's family. His father, Frank Cuomo,
was a musician in his own right. According to Cuomo's official biography, the elder Cuomo
contributed percussion to the album Odyssey of Iska [ISS-kah] by jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter.
Diffuser notes that he also played with jazz fusion band the Weather Report in the 1970s.
Cuomo has honored his dad's musical chops by inviting him to jam out with Weezer on several
occasions. In 2015, he brought him onstage to bang the drums while Weezer played "Back
to the Shack" at the Burgerama festival in Los Angeles. A year later, he summoned him
into the spotlight to play the quintessential Weezer hit "Beverly Hills" at a show in Irvine.
Frank isn't the only Cuomo who has performed with Rivers onstage. During the same tour,
Rivers invited his daughter Mia to play the keys during "Perfect Situation."
Rivers Cuomo grew up having to deal with a mild physical defect. According to Rolling Stone,
he was born with a condition making his left leg 44 millimeters shorter than his right one.
He lived with this condition until 1995, when he decided to use his earnings from Weezer to
undergo a procedure that would remediate the issue. The surgery was quite painful,
involving the breaking of his leg bone. Recovery wasn't easy,
either. Cuomo had to wear a steel brace over his leg for months. He also had to
stretch his leg four times a day, which he described as an "agonizing process."
Per SongFacts, Cuomo's struggles with his leg inspired the Weezer single "The Good Life,"
featured on Pinkerton. The jacket for the single also features an X-ray image of Cuomo's leg.
According to an interview with The Harvard Crimson, Rivers Cuomo first enrolled at Harvard in 1995 when he was 25 years old.
"It's just as terrifying to give an oral presentation to 15
smart kids as it is to like sing on Letterman."
At the time, Weezer had enjoyed some mild recognition with singles from their Blue
Album. Yet Cuomo wasn't sure whether the first album's success had been a fluke.
While attending Harvard in the '90s, Cuomo wrote several songs that would appear on the band's
album Pinkerton. He took some time off in 1996 to tour with Weezer after the album's release,
then he returned for a semester in 2004 before dropping out to focus on his career.
He made a triumphant comeback shortly after, and finally graduated in 2006.
Cuomo first studied music composition; he then changed his major to English. His initial
experience at Harvard was significantly different from his second stint — largely
due to Weezer's spike in popularity. When he set foot onto Harvard's campus in '95,
he wasn't recognized as a celebrity on campus. Cuomo told The Harvard Crimson:
"I [had] pretty long hair and [a] really long, bushy beard,
glasses, walked with a cane. On top of that fact,
our album was not successful with college kids — it was successful with ten-year-olds!"
Things had changed by 2004, however. Cuomo told the university's newspaper in 2006:
"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 [...] I have a very happy and comfortable social life."
In a 2019 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Cuomo refers to himself as a lifelong vegetarian, inspired to take up a plant-based diet by the five
precepts of the Buddha. Cuomo is deeply passionate about the vegetarian lifestyle — to the extent
that he once recorded a vegetarian-themed rap album, according to Rolling Stone.
While Cuomo was undergoing a creative crisis in the 1990s, he challenged himself to write
50 songs in a row before allowing himself to play live again. It was during this period
that he wrote Weezer classic "Undone — The Sweater Song," as well as the aforementioned
vegetarian concept album, titled "Vegeterrorists [veh-jih-TER-er-ists]." Each track featured Cuomo
waxing poetic about his dietary preferences in the style of Public Enemy and Run-DMC.
Jason Cropper, a founding member of Weezer who eventually parted ways with the band,
commended Cuomo's rapping talents in the Rolling Stone article, saying,
"Rivers can drop mad beats and spit mad rhymes with the best."
Unfortunately, the world may never get to corroborate his opinion:
to this day, "Vegeterrorists" remains unreleased.
Per his official bio, Rivers Cuomo was a major fan of soccer growing up,
and to date, he's written two odes to the sport. In 2006, he penned "Our Time Will
Come," an "unofficial" hype song for the U.S. Men's soccer team during the World Cup. In 2010,
Weezer debuted another World Cup anthem — this one titled "Represent." In the lyrics,
Cuomo lays out the stakes for the athletes but also engages in some good-natured boasting.
Cuomo has also spent some time on the field himself. In 2008, he participated in the Mia
Hamm and Nomar Garciaparra Celebrity Soccer Challenge alongside Tony Hawk, Andy Samberg,
and Elisabeth Shue, among others. He put up a real fight during the charity match,
even scoring his team's first goal. The next year, he laced up his cleats again — this
time for the Athletes for Africa 5v5 charity soccer tournament. This time around, he and his
teammates were playing to raise money for a youth center for arts and culture in northern Uganda.
Rivers Cuomo has occasionally gone to extreme lengths for songwriting's sake.
In a 2005 interview with LA Weekly, he elaborated on the drastic method he used
to write the song "Hold Me": fasting. After a short period of starvation,
Cuomo began to notice changes in his mental state, telling the outlet:
"I felt really sad, and I really pitied myself,
and I felt a lot of loss, and of course I was really hungry. [...] [S]o I entered into
this very concentrated state of extreme longing, and started playing that song."
The fasting had done what he had hoped, and not only did he like the song he'd written,
the music actually made him feel considerably better. Despite being proud of his results, Cuomo
is hesitant to encourage artists to follow his example. Cuomo said in the LA Weekly Interview:
"It can't be sustained. If you're relying on extreme emotions, you just become a wreck,
and it's tough for other people to live with you. And it's just not a good life.
Who wants to be constantly cultivating anger and sadness? Not me."
Shortly after fasting, River Cuomo said in his interview with LA Weekly, he turned to meditation.
Cuomo wasn't a total stranger to the practice — he meditated while living on the ashram as a child,
but gave it up around sixth grade. He was initially skeptical about picking it up as
an adult, but he was in such need of a creative breakthrough that he decided to give it a try.
"When I was 32 I felt like
my creative energies were drying up." "I got the idea to try meditation again."
According to ABC News, Cuomo tested out several meditation techniques before settling on the
Vipassana method. He has meditated for two hours a day every day since 2003 — except for one day
in 2009, when he was knocked unconscious in a bus crash. Cuomo told LA Weekly:
"It definitely improves your concentration and creativity,
even in rock music. It's about fighting through whatever internal struggles there
are [...] and really focusing in on what it is you're trying to say."
He feels that meditation has helped shape his life choices, adding:
"I don't know if I ever would have gotten married without
this meditation practice to settle me down and get me focused on my core values."
Meditation is such a major part of Cuomo's life that he's made an effort to pass his knowledge on
to others. A 2009 newsletter from the Vipassana Research Institute reveals that Cuomo used to
teach children's meditation courses there. He also supported the production of The Dhamma Brothers,
a film about Vipassana meditation in an Alabama state prison, according to a press release.
In 2003, Cuomo decided to give up intercourse, temporarily. In a 2005 interview with fans
conducted via AOL chat session, Cuomo elaborated on this choice, saying,
"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."
He asserted that this exercise yielded positive results, revealing in the AOL chat:
"I know I can hear a difference in my singing [...] I also notice a difference
in the lyrics. I'm much more open and communicative about my emotions now."
On top of that, he believes his lifestyle of discipline
has affected his demeanor in the studio, as well, saying,
"I don't have so much fear that I won't get my way.
I don't have so much anger if people have opposing opinions
and generally I'm much more happy and comfortable in collaborative situations."
Cuomo's period of abstinence ended when he married his girlfriend, Kyoko Ito, in 2006. According to
Cuomo's 2006 interview with The Harvard Crimson, Ito and Cuomo met at one of Cuomo's solo shows
in 1997. The fact that Ito was originally a Weezer fan isn't something that factors
into their relationship, and it's something he's grateful for. Cuomo told the Crimson:
"Thankfully, I haven't thought along those lines very much.
I just kind of forget how we met, and she's just my woman."
Scrolling through Weezer's discography, you might notice that few of the band's songs are
labeled "explicit." This is by design — Rivers Cuomo isn't a big fan of swearing in music,
and prefers to keep his songs fairly curse-free. In a 2008 interview with Rolling Stone,
Cuomo explains the artistic logic behind his decision, citing the Beach Boys as an inspiration:
"I don't like to use real swear words. Weezer came up at a time when Jane's Addiction released
'Nothing's Shocking' — everyone was trying to be controversial. We looked back to rock & roll's
pre-drug days — to the clean im­ages of the Beach Boys — that felt, ironically, rebellious."
In 2019, Weezer released their Black Album, which saw Cuomo using stronger language. However,
he soon reverted to his former ways, keeping it relatively clean on the band's following records.
Rivers Cuomo has been known to approach songwriting from a mathematical perspective. In a 2002 interview with Rolling
Stone, he spoke of a notebook he kept in the late 1990s, in which he meticulously dissected
every song Kurt Cobain had ever written. According to Todd Sullivan, Weezer's A&R man,
"He figured if he could home in on Kurt's formula,
he'd figure out his own formula [...] That way, he would be a never-ending supply of songs."
After filling out his Nirvana notebook, Cuomo moved onto another creative exercise: a three-ring
binder he called "the Encyclopedia of Pop," in which he stores his in-depth analyses of songs
by various artists he admires. The work isn't tedious to him, but entertaining. Cuomo said,
"I'm probably just a natural-born scientist. I like taking notes and analyzing things."
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