Rivers Cuomo

Cuomo was born in New York City and raised in a number of Buddhist communities in the Northeastern U.S. until the age of 10, when his family settled in Connecticut. He played in several bands in Connecticut and California before forming Weezer in 1992.


Following the success of Weezer's debut, the Blue Album (1994), Cuomo enrolled at Harvard University, but dropped out after recording Weezer's second album, Pinkerton (1996). He later re-enrolled and graduated in 2006. Though Pinkerton is now frequently cited among the best albums of the 1990s and has been certified platinum, it was initially a commercial and critical failure, pushing Cuomo's songwriting toward pop music for their next album, the Green Album (2001). Weezer have released more than a dozen albums since.


Cuomo has released several compilations of demos, including Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo (2007), Alone II: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo (2008) and Alone III: The Pinkerton Years (2011), and has released thousands of home recordings on his website. He has collaborated with artists including Todd Rundgren and Panic! at the Disco. With the American songwriter Scott Murphy, Cuomo has released two Japanese-language albums under the name Scott & Rivers.

Early life[edit]

Rivers Cuomo was born on June 13, 1970, in New York City to Frank Cuomo, of Italian descent, and Beverly Shoenberger, of German-English descent.^[2][3] Frank was a musician who played drums on the 1971 album Odyssey of Iska by the jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter.^[4] According to one account, Cuomo's mother named him Rivers either because he was born between the East and Hudson rivers in Manhattan or because she could hear a river outside her hospital window. However, his father said Rivers was named after three prominent soccer players: Rivellino, Luigi Riva, and Gianni Rivera, all of whom were playing in the 1970 World Cup.^[5]


Cuomo was raised in Rochester, New York, at the Rochester Zen Center, until his father left the family in 1975. His mother relocated the family to Yogaville, an ashram in Pomfret, Connecticut. Cuomo attended the Pomfret Community School, and his mother married Stephen Kitts.^[6] In 1980, Yogaville relocated to Virginia. The Kitts family opted to stay in Connecticut and moved to the Storrs/Mansfield area.^[7] During this time, Cuomo attended Mansfield Middle School and E.O. Smith High School. Rivers was a member of the high school choir and he performed in a school production of Grease as Johnny Casino.^{[8][9][10][11]} He also changed his name to Peter Kitts;^[12] after graduating, Cuomo reverted to his original name.^[13]


One of Cuomo's earliest music projects was the glam metal band Avant Garde.^[14] In 1989, after playing several shows in Connecticut, Avant Garde moved to Los Angeles and changed their name to Zoom, but broke up in 1990.^[15][16][17] During this time, Cuomo attended Santa Monica College.^[18] In 1990 and 1991, while Cuomo was writing material for what became Weezer's debut album, he was a roadie for the band King Size.^[19] He also worked at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, where he met the drummer Patrick Wilson.^[20]


In this period, Cuomo began to move away from metal and absorbed alternative influences such as Nirvana, the Pixies and Sonic Youth.^[21] He did not want audiences to realize he had once been a metal musician, as "There was so much anxiety about authenticity at the time."^[20] He also began to think of himself as a singer for the first time.^[20]

Personal life[edit]

Cuomo took a vow of sexual abstinence from 2003 until his marriage in 2006, and considered his celibacy to be a positive impact on Weezer's Make Believe (2005).^[68] On June 18, 2006, Cuomo married Kyoko Ito, whom he met in March 1997 at one of his solo concerts at the Middle East club in Cambridge, Massachusetts.^[69][70] He proposed to her in Tokyo shortly before Christmas 2005.^[71] The wedding was held at a beach on Paradise Cove in Malibu and was attended by all past and present members of Weezer (except for Mikey Welsh), as well as Kevin Ridel and Rick Rubin.^[72] The couple have two children: daughter Mia, born in 2007, and son Leo, born in 2011.


Cuomo was born with equal length legs, but as he grew to his full height, his right leg grew nearly two inches longer than his left. After the success of The Blue Album, Cuomo underwent the Ilizarov procedure to correct the condition. This involved the surgical breaking of the bone in his leg, followed by several months of wearing a steel brace that required self-administered "stretching" of the leg four times daily. Cuomo likened the ordeal to "crucifying his leg".^[26]


Cuomo has been vegetarian since childhood.^[73][74] However, in 2002, he told an interviewer that he might like to start eating meat regularly and stated he had done so in the past, eating "some kind of barbecued beef in Tokyo."^[74]


Cuomo practices Vipassanā meditation and was a student of S. N. Goenka.^[75] As of mid-2009, he also teaches children's meditation as taught by S. N. Goenka.^[76] Cuomo helped acquire music rights and provided financial support to a 2007 documentary titled The Dhamma Brothers about Vipassanā meditation being instituted in an Alabama state prison.^[77]


Cuomo was a fan of soccer at an early age.^[78] He wrote a song, "My Day Is Coming", in tribute to the U.S. men's soccer team in 2006, and in 2010, wrote "Represent", an "unofficial anthem" for the U.S. team, which was released as a Weezer single on June 11, the day before Team USA's World Cup opener against England.^[79] In early 2008, Cuomo played in the Mia and Nomar Celebrity Soccer Challenge and scored a goal in the game. The video for "Lover in the Snow", from the Alone album, deals with this game and his love of soccer growing up.^[79] In August 2009, Cuomo participated in the Athletes for Africa 5v5 Charity Soccer Tournament in Toronto, Canada alongside actor Michael Cera.^[80][81]


Cuomo performed at a campaign rally for Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang in Iowa on November 1, 2019, though Cuomo did not explicitly endorse Yang.^[82][83]


Cuomo's hobbies include computer programming. He took the CS50 course and maintains a GitHub profile, and also maintains a Discord server.^[84][85][86]