Rivers Cuomo is selling more than 86 hours of unreleased demos as part of a class project
Rivers Cuomo is a coder now. In a new interview with TechCrunch, the Weezer frontman sounds delighted to discuss his new hobby, which has resulted in both a tour management app, Drivetimes, and an online market filled with literally thousands of demo recordings. A mishmash of fully-realized songs, bare-bones sketches, and other scraps, they encompass the songwriter’s work between 1976 and 2015. The market was created as part of an online programming class.
“The coding part wasn’t easy, but for everyone else, it’s a couple of clicks and you’ve got all this music, and it’s a cheap price, and there’s no middleman,” he told TechCrunch. “And there’s just something, it feels so good when it’s directly from me to the audience.”
There’s nine individual demo collections, each priced at $9, that range between 90 minutes and (gulp) 38 hours. “Too many thoughts in my head,” read the liner notes of the latter, which were born from the Everything Will Be Alright In The End years. One collection pre-dates Weezer. Another, titled The Black Room, aligns with the crisis of confidence Cuomo suffered following the initial backlash that met Pinkerton. Others center around the various LPs leading up to 2016's self-titled “White” album. If that all sounds a bit much, there’s also a Best Of The Demos compilation that runs a tight 82 minutes.