Red Redone

(image courtesy of dasgamer.com, a website I've never been to.)

I'm not a musician, but I have no doubt that it's very difficult to pull together a finished album. You (individually or collectively) work for so long composing melodies, sketching lyrics, marrying elements, trial-and-erroring your way to three to five minutes you're satisfied with. And you have to then do that nine or more times to successfully generate enough material for an album. Not to mention the time and energy put into recording and mixing processes and all that other stuff that makes no sense to me. Figuring out how to order said material in the finished product must get only a fraction of the attention that every other element gets.

You probably know Weezer, even if you aren't into music made after 1980. They've had some pretty big hits and some stretches of pop culture relevance for 15 years now. If you have any affinity for them, you probably already know this basic timeline: two stellar albums in the 90s, band goes on sabbatical, comes back in 00s with four more albums. The reactions to the latter tend to vary between "very good" to "serviceable yet patchy" to "wretched."

As someone who is generally more forgiving of their later work, I picked up (if you can pick up an iTunes download) their most recent album, Weezer (aka The Red Album) (which would be their third self-titled/color coded release, making them the most successful alumni of the Peter Gabriel school of album naming). Though it felt like it should have been their strongest post-Pinkerton album, listening to it left me with a strong sense of "meh." A lot of it was great - a few really nice rock songs, and some more intricate (relatively) things that hearkened back to their heyday. But it didn't really hold together, with some songs not passing muster (I'm looking at you, Heart Songs and Everybody Get Dangerous) and Brian Bell's contribution leading to awkward and heart-breaking comparisons to Uncle Kracker.

Thankfully, I threw out the extra dollars in my purchase to get the expanded edition, which had five extra songs. In this batch were two excellent, quirky songs based around animals and death (Pig and Spider), and the best song they've done since their heyday (Miss Sweeney, an awkward yet touching song about love and/or sexual harassment).

I have no idea how these were kept off the finished official record. Clearly, somewhere along the line, somebody dropped the ball. Thankfully, I'm here to help Rivers Cuomo & Co by telling them how they need to re-arrange things for any future pressings of the album. So here you go, the improved running order for The Red Album:

01. Dreamin'
02. Troublemaker
03. Pork & Beans
04. Pig
05. Cold Dark World
06. The Spider
07. Automatic
08. Miss Sweeney
09. The Greatest Man That Ever Lived
10. The Angel And The One

Why I Am Awesome: I am better than established musical artists at assembling their albums.

Why I Am Not Awesome: None of Rivers, Karl Koch or representatives at DGC Records will return my calls or emails.