The way my life had worked out to that point, the way I was raised I felt like I didn’t have the opportunity to get schooled. What I meant by that was that I felt like I had so much musical potential, artistic potential, to get into really sophisticated art music, classical music-and I just felt like I needed some intense training in the fundamentals. What did you mean by you were “wasting your life” before going to Harvard? You had just become a huge rock star. Socially, I was kind of retreating into a shell after the shock of being in the spotlight in ’94 when our film was released. And I couldn’t drive, because my leg was all jacked up. And on top of that, to be Harvard! Just the greatest place in the world for me to be. To go back to college was so exciting to me. Touring in a van and just feeling like I was wasting my life.

I was craving mental stimulation for about a year and a half leading up to that point, being on the road. Is that how you recall your first semester there? It has been described as a very bleak time in your life. You started going to Harvard in this time period. Weezer Punctually Ring in Fall With 'SZNZ: Autumn' EP And so I scrapped the whole idea and went to a more serious and dark place. Also, I had this really painful surgical procedure on my leg, which lasted 13 months in all and it took me to a place, emotionally, where the whole idea of this whole rock opera started to feel too whimsical for where I was emotionally, going through the pain of the procedure. So that would be one contributing factor, my change of heart. And then our bass player, Matt, put out his first solo record and I felt like it had a lot of the same musical and lyrical themes that I was planning to explore on the second record.

Oh, I would have to go back and look at my notes but… I think I was planning to make the second Weezer album a sort of space-travel-themed rock opera with lots of synthesizers and new wave flavor over the Weezer rock sound. Can you tell me why you abandoned that in favor of Pinkerton? The second Weezer album was originally going to be a rock opera called Songs From The Black Hole. Cuomo used to hate to discuss the intensely personal album, calling it “sick in a diseased sort of way.” But he called into Rolling Stone to explain his change of heart and the rough period of his life in the mid-1990s that inspired Weezer’s masterpiece. Today Weezer release a two-CD deluxe version of their 1996 album Pinkerton, and launch a short tour where they play it in sequence.

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