Audiobooks can be many things: intimate, illuminating, heart-shattering, life-changing. But can they rock? If anyone could convince me that the answer is a resounding "HELL YES" it’s Weezer, whose albums I once copped at the old Tower Records (RIP) in ’90s-era Austin (double RIP), and whose ever-evolving, always-recognizable music keeps finding new generations of fans decades later—just ask my kids.
But while these fans were patiently awaiting the previously announced Van Weezer, the band dropped a surprise: another album, , recorded with a 38-member orchestra, inspired by Pet Sounds and our disconcerting relationship with technology. Released today, the album is lush, irresistible—and it contains a track, “,” inspired by frontman Rivers Cuomo's deep, extremely knowledgeable passion for audiobooks. Name-checking , , and Steinbeck’s , the lyrics even feature Cuomo singing, “I’m gonna rock my Audible.”
As the old adage goes, this was not on our 2021 bingo cards.
We needed to know more, so we checked in with Rivers, who graciously answered our questions and despite being on a retreat even recorded them in audio, because he's a man who knows the power of voice. Check out his responses below, and play each clip to hear Rivers in his own words.
Audible: We love Weezer here at Audible, so we were delighted—if shocked!—to learn the feeling was mutual. “Grapes of Wrath” is the first rock song about audiobooks that I’ve ever heard of. How did it come about?
Rivers Cuomo: One night a few years ago I woke up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I decided to listen to an audiobook on Audible. I did that from time to time anyway, but this was the first time I did it in the middle of the night. I stayed up for a couple hours, just listening and listening to . I did not get good sleep, but it was a pretty magical experience. There’s something about that state of the brain, that time of night—I’m able to drift into this more imaginative state and really enter the world of the writer’s imagination.
The next day, I woke up and it was time to go write songs ’cause that’s what I do, and I was pretty sleepy and just feeling like, not ambitious and what’s the point? But then, I found myself in that same half-asleep brain state, and it was kind of pleasant. I remembered reading an interview with the producer Quincy Jones, and he said the whole time he was producing Michael Jackson’s Thriller, he was half-asleep behind the mixing board. He mentioned something about beta waves, like when your brain is producing these beta waves it’s a better state for creativity and imagination than when you’re fully awake and more conscious about what you’re doing. I think also I’d heard that Thomas Edison, the great inventor, was constantly dozing off as he was coming up with all these amazing inventions. So I took that opportunity of being in that beta-wave state and wrote a song about my experience listening to for a long time in the middle of the night.
