Blue Album

Weezer wanted to produce this album themselves, in the garage in Los Angeles where they had been rehearsing. Geffen Records said no. The label sent their demos to several big-name producers and the one who showed up in person was Ric Ocasek, frontman of the Cars, who visited their Hollywood rehearsal space one afternoon and watched them play. In anticipation of his arrival, the band had quickly learned to cover one of his songs as a tribute. He agreed to produce the album. They recorded it at Electric Lady Studios in New York, the studio Jimi Hendrix built, in two months in the late summer of 1993.

Ocasek imposed a set of rules in the studio that defined the album's sound. No reverb anywhere. All downstrokes on guitar only. The guitars and bass would be treated as a single ten-string instrument playing in unison, the guitars mixed as loud as the guitars on Radiohead's "Creep." He convinced the band to switch their guitar pickups from neck to bridge position, making the whole sound brighter and harder. Rivers Cuomo later described their pre-Ocasek sound as crusty and muddy and said Ocasek simply told them to turn up the brightness. That brightness became the album's signature.

The Blue Album arrived in May 1994, a month after Kurt Cobain died, into a rock world that had no obvious path forward from grunge. Weezer provided one: Beach Boys harmonies fed through loud distorted guitars, songs about garage doors and Dungeons and Dragons and being in love with someone you can't talk to. "Buddy Holly," "Undone," "Say It Ain't So," "In the Garage," and "Only in Dreams" are five of the most perfectly constructed pop-rock songs of the decade. On your first listen, notice how the whole album is exactly as long as it needs to be, and not a second longer.