Number 026 (Interview)

Rivers: I remember having a very strong vision for the first album, The Blue Album, what that cover was gonna look like. I never anticipated people would call it "The Blue Album", or even Weezer. I just thought of it as an untitled album. It was like the year later that we noticed that everyone was calling it "The Blue Album". And, since then, seems like every other album we come up with a strong, uh, idea for what the album is about and we get these titles like "Pinkerton" or "Maladroit"... "Raditude"... "Make Believe"... and sometimes we don't. And, uh, we just put a picture of ourselves up on the cover and, uh...

Brian: Put a color behind it.

Rivers: Heh, yeah, in fact The Green Album, I remember, I was thinking it was just going to be, uh, a white background. And so, we took a picture in front of the white background, sent it to the art director, and he sent it back, like I had requested, but he also sent back a few different versions with different colors in the background, one of them was green. So I took them, printed them up and brought them to the record store, uh, the CD store, which still existed back then.

Pat: Ha!

Rivers: And uh, I put up all these mockups in the racks, and then I walked back about 15 feet and looked and the green one just stood out [laughter] from everything, I was like "That's our cover!" [laughter]

Brian: Heh...

Rivers: I think there's a misconception out there that I had an insane amount of material going into the making of The Green Album and at the end of 2000. I guess I did have a lot of material but most of it was like, half-finished, abandoned ideas. Kind of half-songs and then I'd give up and get disheartened and then move on to the next one. So there's a big pile of stuff there, but [laughs] I don't... yeah.

Brian: But what was most impressive, I think this was like, during a hiatus... uh, between records, and uh, Rivers had a new house at this time and I came over to see him for the first time and see, he was gonna show me some songs, I don't know if that was on purpose but I looked on the wall, and it was a chronologically listed of, like, number... I don't know, 026, this song. And I looked at all these song titles on the wall and I remember going "what's this one?" and I pointed to "Island in the Sun" first, and that was the first one he played to me. So then we were onto something, or he was onto something, out of a song title, yeah.

Rivers: All that stuff on a list, you picked one of the best songs.