Great Lost Weezer Songs: 2009 Edition Part 1
It’s been three years since I last posted up the Great Lost Weezer Songs collection. To this day, it remains the content that I’m asked most often to re-post. I’ve shied away from doing so for most of the intervening period, but listening to some of these again recently has changed my mind once more. As such, the 2009 edition of Great Lost Weezer Songs will contain more recordings than any previous version, clocking in at almost 40 tracks. Some of the songs posted in 2006 are no included as they have become commercially available as part of the Rivers Cuomo Alone releases. A handful of these are alternative versions of songs that eventually appeared on albums. The vast majority are original songs that never really got beyond the demo stage. Some are great. Others not so much. However, if you’re a fan of the band, they will most certainly be interesting.
This is the first collection of tracks. The rest will be posted on Sundays over the next month. Part 2 will be available on April 25. Part 3 will be available on May 2. The final part will be available on May 9. Depending on how much bandwidth this uses (previously it was a lot) I may have the remove the songs of the previous week before posting any new ones. With that in mind, you might want to grab them while you can.
A more mellow song that one comes to expect from Weezer. It was originally recorded with the intention of being a part of ‘Maladroit’, but like a ton of these songs, was eventually scrapped for no obvious reason. It covers pretty standard Rivers territory lyrically (guy finds perfect girl, perfect girl leaves), but it’s simplicity and brevity makes the song come across as far lighter fare.
This is the song that closest matches the style of “current” Weezer, meaning it’s weaker than most of the ones here, but as current Weezer goes, it’s actually pretty good. The lyrics are pretty dumb and simplistic, but it’s short and manages to rock pretty well in the meantime.
Booby Trap is from the period where Rivers wrote pretty simplistic songs, but it’s one of the better ones to fall into this category. And there’s something oddly enjoyable about Rivers asking “am I just going mental?” over and over.
Sadly not a song about the John Travolta / Christian Slater smackdown of the same name. Instead, it’s a Rivers standard about lamenting a relationship that has either ended or is ending. Not one of their greatest in all fairness, but it still remains rather catchy.
Burndt Jamb obviously ended up on Maladroit in entirely different forms. It started off as an impressive little instrumental song. It then had rather good lyrics added to it. These lyrics were then replaced with non-sensical drivel. Guess which version ended up making the album. Yeah. Anyway, this instrumental is actually rather good in that it is far more elaborate in it’s construction than the finished album version.
Another Weezer song where the fans are seemingly taken to task over how fickle they were following the Pinkerton to Green debacle. This seems to be a theme in a bunch of the songs from one particular time, something that manifested itself properly on certain Maladroit songs.
The strangest song here, and unfortunately I can’t remember any story behind it. I remember it being posted to the website out of the blue with a couple of other “unique” sounding songs, but nothing more ever seemed to come of any of them. I’m inclined to think it was a joke more than anything else, but it’s certainly amusing. I really don’t have the words to describe it, but if I didn’t know it was Weezer, I probably wouldn’t believe it if someone told me that was the case. It’s just downright bizarre, although any rock band who can feature whistling in their songs gets a thumbs up from me.
I’m not really a fan of instrumentals but this one manages to work for me. Probably because it wasn’t intended to be one. Working from pure speculation, I’m going to assume that this was intended to be a full song with lyrics and all, but it just never got any further along than this stage. Which is quite a shame as there’s a lot of potential in it.
Like Burndt Jamb, Death and Destruction started off as an instrumental that had silly lyrics added to it by the time it made an album. This version is enjoyable if only for how wonderfully melancholy it all sounds even without words and the little flourishes that appear every now and then.
This concludes the first collection. Remember that the rest will be posted over the next three Sundays.
Comments