Amanda Petrusich’s New Yorker interview with Rivers Cuomo lands as Weezer drops its twentieth studio LP, the Gold Album — and it turns into more than album promo: a conversation about memory, biography, and the stories we inherit. It opens with Cuomo asking the interviewer to read Macbeth aloud with him.

His current obsession is “Lore,” a project collecting every experience he’s ever had — journals, letters, interviews — in strict chronological order:

  • Forensic, not cathartic: “I don’t do that” with imposed meaning; getting events in order is “soothing,” like organizing a room
  • A detective story: dating memories against each other (“if I picked up my shoes in Manchester, Connecticut, on November 2, 1986, I must have gone to Berklee after that”)
  • Fed by archival finds: after his father died in January, he discovered the man had saved every letter the family ever sent

The father thread is the emotional core. Cuomo was four or five when his parents split; he was raised in spiritual communities including the Yogaville ashram, and saw his father only a handful of times before his mid-twenties. “Say It Ain’t So” channeled the anger; a fax — “We have to talk” — reopened the relationship. Now, reading his father’s letters:

  • “I feel like I picked up some stories through the ether, through the cultural narrative, in the eighties, of abusive fathers, alcoholic fathers, fathers that abandon their kids. Somehow, that became my story. I don’t know how true that was.”
  • He worries the same misreading could happen with his own son: “What if for some reason he ended up growing up thinking I didn’t care about him?”

On the album itself: co-written with drummer Patrick Wilson, produced by Kenneth Blume and Klas Åhlund, recorded live with no grid — vibe and “the veracity of the performance” over digital precision. On AI: the novelty wore off fast, and it made Cuomo hungrier for the eccentric — “we want proof that an A.I. didn’t polish it.”

A good companion piece to the Dolly Parton working-class music captures — another look at what artists carry and what they choose to tell.