Pinkerton (album)
Pinkerton is the second studio album by the American rock band Weezer, released on September 24, 1996, by DGC Records. The guitarist and vocalist Rivers Cuomo wrote most of Pinkerton while studying at Harvard University, after abandoning plans for a rock opera, Songs from the Black Hole. It was the last Weezer album to feature bassist Matt Sharp, who left the group in 1998.
Pinkerton
September 24, 1996
September 1995 – June 1996
- Sound City (Hollywood)
- Hollywood Sound (Los Angeles)
- Fort Apache (Boston)
- Rumbo (Los Angeles)
- Electric Lady (New York)
34:36
Weezer
To better capture their live sound, Weezer self-produced Pinkerton, creating a darker, more abrasive album than their self-titled 1994 debut. Cuomo's lyrics express loneliness and disillusionment with the rock lifestyle; the album is named after the character BF Pinkerton from Giacomo Puccini's 1904 opera Madama Butterfly, whom Cuomo described as an "asshole American sailor similar to a touring rock star". Like the opera, the album contains references to Japanese culture.
Pinkerton produced the singles "El Scorcho", "The Good Life", and "Pink Triangle", and debuted at number nineteen on the US Billboard 200. It failed to meet sales expectations, and received mixed reviews; Rolling Stone readers voted it the third-worst album of 1996. Embarrassed, Cuomo returned to more traditional pop songwriting and less personal lyrics for Weezer's subsequent albums. In the years following its release, Pinkerton was reassessed and achieved acclaim; several publications have named it one of the best albums of the 1990s, and it was certified platinum in 2016. It was credited as an influence by several emo bands.
Recording[edit]
In 1995, shortly before Cuomo left to study at Harvard, Weezer spent two weeks at New York City's Electric Lady Studios, where they had recorded their debut, and tracked the songs "Why Bother?", "Getchoo", "No Other One" and "Tired of Sex".[9][10] Weezer hoped to explore "deeper, darker, more experimental stuff"[10] and better capture their live sound.[11] They decided against hiring a producer, feeling that "the best way for us to sound like ourselves is to record on our own".[12] To give the album a live, "raw" feel, Cuomo, guitarist Brian Bell and bassist Matt Sharp recorded their vocals in tandem around three microphones rather than overdubbing them separately.[13]
While Cuomo was at Harvard, other Weezer members worked on side projects.[14] Sharp promoted Return of the Rentals, the debut album by his band the Rentals,[14] and Bell and drummer Patrick Wilson worked on material for their bands the Space Twins and the Special Goodness.[9][14] In January 1996, during Cuomo's winter break, Weezer regrouped for a two-week session at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, to complete the songs they had worked on in August.[15] After recording "El Scorcho" and "Pink Triangle", they separated again while Cuomo returned to Harvard.[15]
During Cuomo's 1996 spring break, Weezer regrouped at Sound City Studios and recorded "The Good Life", "Across the Sea" and "Falling for You" before Cuomo returned to Harvard for his finals.[16] They completed Pinkerton in mid-1996 in Los Angeles. Two additional tracks, "I Swear It's True" and "Getting Up and Leaving", were abandoned prior to mixing.[17]
Music and lyrics[edit]
Pinkerton features a darker, more abrasive sound than Weezer's debut.[18][19] Writing from a more direct and personal perspective,[20] Cuomo wrote of his dysfunctional relationships, sexual frustration, and struggles with identity.[13][21][22][23][24] The album charts his "cycle between 'lame-o and partier'".[25] At just under 35 minutes, Pinkerton is, according to Cuomo, "short by design".[13] Genre-wise, critics have described the album as alternative rock,[26][27] emo,[28][29] power pop,[30] pop-punk,[18][31] indie rock,[32] and lo-fi.[33]
The first song, "Tired of Sex", written before the release of the Blue Album,[34] has Cuomo describing meaningless sex encounters with groupies, reciting his list of encounters and wondering why true love eludes him.[13] "Across the Sea" was inspired by a letter Cuomo received from a Japanese fan: "When I got the letter, I fell in love with her. It was such a great letter. I was very lonely at the time, but at the same time I was very depressed that I would never meet her."[23]
"The Good Life" chronicles the rebirth of Cuomo after an identity crisis as an Ivy League loner. Cuomo, who felt isolated at Harvard, wrote the song after "becoming frustrated with that hermit's life I was leading, the ascetic life. And I think I was starting to become frustrated with my whole dream about purifying myself and trying to live like a monk or an intellectual and going to school and holding out for this perfect, ideal woman. And so I wrote the song. And I started to turn around and come back the other way."[22][23]
"El Scorcho" addresses Cuomo's shyness and inability to approach a girl while at Harvard; he explained that the song "is more about me, because at that point I hadn't even talked to the girl, I didn't really know much about her."[23] "Pink Triangle" describes a man who falls in love, but discovers the object of his devotion is a lesbian.[24]
Pinkerton is named after the character BF Pinkerton from Madama Butterfly, who marries and then abandons a Japanese woman named Butterfly.[35] Calling him an "asshole American sailor similar to a touring rock star", Cuomo felt the character was "the perfect symbol for the part of myself that I am trying to come to terms with on this album".[36] Other titles considered included Playboy and Diving into the Wreck (after a poem by Adrienne Rich).[36]
Like Madama Butterfly, Pinkerton views Japanese culture from the perspective of an outsider who considers Japan fragile and sensual;[37] the Japanese allusions are infused with the narrator's romantic disappointments and sexual frustration.[19] Cuomo wrote that Pinkerton "is really the clash of East vs West. My hindu, zen, kyokushin, self-denial, self-abnegation, no-emotion, cool-faced side versus my Italian-American heavy metal side".[38] The songs are mostly sequenced in the order in which he wrote them, and so "the album kind of tells the story of my struggle with my inner Pinkerton".[39]
Reissues and other releases[edit]
On November 2, 2010, DGC released a "deluxe" Pinkerton reissue with an additional disc containing live performances, B-sides, and previously unreleased songs.[103] The reissue debuted at number six on the Billboard Catalog Albums chart[104] and achieved a perfect score on the aggregate review website Metacritic.[105]
Cuomo's 2011 compilation album Alone III: The Pinkerton Years comprises demos recorded between 1993 and 1996, when Cuomo was studying at Harvard and writing material for Pinkerton and the abandoned Songs from the Black Hole project. The album was included with a book, The Pinkerton Diaries, which collects Cuomo's writings from the era.[106]
In May 2016, Pinkerton was reissued on vinyl by the record subscription service Vinyl Me, Please. The album is pressed on "dark blue translucent vinyl with black marbling" and is packaged in a custom sleeve with pop-out art, a custom lyric sheet, artwork by Japanese painter Fuco Ueda, and a sake cocktail recipe.[107]
Adapted from the liner notes.[41]
Weezer
Additional musicians
Technical personnel
Works cited