You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Summer Elaine and Drunk Dory is a song on Weezer's 10th album,
the self-titled White Album, which came out on April 1st, 2016.
For this episode, I spoke to Weezer's frontman, Rivers Cuomo, at his home studio in Santa Monica.
He showed me all the different demo versions that this song went through,
as he detailed his meticulous process,
which includes an array of spreadsheets that he uses to collect, analyze, and harvest his ideas.
My name's Rishi K. Shirwe.
You're listening to Song Exploder.
My name is Rivers Cuomo.
I play electric guitar and I sing.
One of the first things I did was I looked in my Spotify playlist that is a collection of songs I've heard that have cool chord progressions.
I'm going to go back and basically farm those songs for cool chord progressions.
So I looked in there and there's a song called Walk Away Renee by The Left Bank.
And then I kind of go back and replay it like Weezer style with my distorted guitar.
I noticed that the file name of this first demo that Rivers was playing was called Awaken Early.
I asked him where that name came from.
We want the identity of the original song to be obscured so I'm not influenced by it when I'm writing my own melody.