Buddy Holly

Buddy Holly

Rivers Cuomo

“June 1993
I was in the Santa Monica College Choir and I met a kid named Steve Graff who lent me his Korg Keyboard. Inspired by its goofy synth sounds, I decided to write some new-wave influenced songs.

The chorus melody, though, I came up with as I was walking through the lawns of the campus. The melody was in time to my steps: ‘ooo-we-ooo I look just like Buddy Holly.’ The lyrics I struggled with, trying to find the right reference point. An early version read, ‘ooo-we-ooo you look just like Ginger Rogers. Oh-oh I move just like Fred Astaire."

The life-situation that inspired the lyric was an incident in which the Weezer guys were making fun of my friend Kyung He (also in the Santa Monica College Choir). They were the ‘homies dissin’ my girl".

I rarley wrote lyrics about tension between me and the guys in the band because I thought it would be awkward for us all to perform those songs together. In this case, though, it didn’t seem like a big deal.

Obviously, this track is kind of slow compared to how it ended up on the Weezer record. [Even on the Weezer record we recorded it pretty slow. We sped it up during mastering.] I’ve always liked big, fat, heavy guitar sounds and when I write in a song with a sound like that I end up digging in and playing real slow. It isn’t ‘til we hear a song back on tape that we realize, 'hey, thats a little dirgy.’“
-Rivers Cuomo (taken from CD booklet)