RIVERS CUOMO

Being in Weezer's just gotten so much more fun over the years. I love almost every part of my job. My very favorite part is working on new songs.

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 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.

Weezer isn't stuck in roles, so we just do what we want to do, what makes us excited.

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

Probably the most reliable comfort music for me over the years has been Bach.

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.

I found that so many people in the music business started out as metalheads in the Eighties - whether they're songwriters, producers, engineers or executives, and no matter what they look like, with short hair, suits or whatever. I feel like my generation of metal kids really tends to populate the music world to a large extent.

Most people don't really need to hear a six-minute guitar solo that modulates between five keys and time signatures. What they want is a good song.

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!

I just gotta keep reminding myself: Every time I do an interview or something, my volition really has to be just to serve, to help people. Not to feel like I'm important.

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 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.

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'm often troubled by a very strong instinct to share everything that's going on with me. I want to feel that connection, even with people I don't know. Then this other voice says, 'That's not prudent. People will use what you've said to hurt you.'

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.

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.

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.

With no faith, purely as a scientific experiment, I started meditating and watched if it changed my music. It did, but it didn't make it more mellow. It made it easier to get into the flow of creativity.

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 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.

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

I feel so much feedback in a very profound way from the 10,000 people who are listening to me, watching me. I just get this deep sense of what works and what doesn't work.

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.