Weezer Riff Download
Marion Loyd
"I remember the moment I came up with that riff," Cuomo recalled, as transcribed by Loudwire. "I was about 20, 21-years-old and I had been exposed to cool music finally after moving to L.A. from Connecticut. I got a job at Tower Records and started listening to Sonic Youth and Pixies and Velvet Underground and I was like, 'I'm going to try to write a Velvet Underground song.' And I sat down and came up with 'The Sweater Song' riff and I was like, 'Yes, this is so cool.'"
"A couple of years went by, we got signed, put out a record, it blew up, very happy," he continued. "Then in 1995, we end up playing a big festival in New York City and Lars Ulrich was there from Metallica and I saw him backstage. The truth is, I was a huge metalhead in high school and that's how I learned to play my instrument. And then suddenly it occurred to me, 'The Sweater Song,' the riff, it's actually very similar to 'Sanitarium.'"
The Catalog O' Riffs, sometimes abbreviated as C.O.R., documents riffs and songs that Rivers Cuomo has written since it's inception on January 1, 1999. In 2002, the C.O.R. was merged with "The Grand Schedule" and has been called "The Grand File" ever since. The C.O.R. was hosted on Cuomo's personal website, riverscuomo.com, until he took it down in 2002.
The first entry was a song called "I Want You". The last one that was made public on Cuomo's website was #398 "The Ruler's Back" on October 1, 2002. The Recording History on weezer.com was still including the catalog numbers with the songs up until to the recording of Make Believe, making #669, "Beverly Hills", the last known entry for several years until the release of Alone IX: The Make Believe Years in 2020. Additional entries have since been made known via The 4 and 5 Star Demos of Rivers Cuomo in 2008 and 2010, as well as filenames listed on the demo storefront on riverscuomo.com in 2020. The song "Sappy Sweet" (which later became the piano intro to "All My Friends Are Insects"), from 2004, is the last presently-known entry, at #672.
Musician Evan Marsalli, who plays drums in the band Diet Lite, began playing the classic riff every day in 2020, and did so for 990 days straight until frontman Rivers Cuomo finally duetted the video to invite the guitarist to play with the band on tour.
In June 2020, isolated in the early months of the pandemic, Evan Marsalli challenged himself on his then-new TikTok account. The drummer for Milwaukee garage-rock band Diet Lite played the signature guitar riff from Weezer's "Buddy Holly" and vowed to do it every single day.
It didn't take too long for Weezer's camp to notice. In October 2000, the band's social media team reached out to Marsalli about potentially setting something up with Cuomo. Literal years went by with no follow-up, but Marsalli continued playing the riff on TikTok every day.
Marselli started the project in 2020 as a challenge for Cuomo to duet with him. As of February 26, he has played the riff 990 days in a row. The challenge has garnered him over 15,000 followers and 934,500 likes on the platform.
A lot of people seem to deny they even enjoy anything about Weezer after the memes started circulating. The riff and their reputation of being very nerdy, drew a lot of people away from being fans of their music.
It all started in June 2020, when Evan Marsalli, a drummer for a small Milwaukee-based band called Diet Lite, posted a 12-second video playing an eight-note riff from "Buddy Holly," one of the most popular songs by the alternative rock band Weezer.
Each day for more than two and a half years, Marsalli played the riff on his account, experimenting with different guitars, costumes, and backdrops, hoping that Cuomo would see his videos and duet him.
"I remember the moment I came up with that riff," says Cuomo. "I was about 20, 21-years-old and I had been exposed to cool music finally after moving to L.A. from Connecticut. I got a job at Tower Records and started listening to Sonic Youth and Pixies and Velvet Underground and I was like, 'I'm going to try to write a Velvet Underground song.' And I sat down and came up with 'The Sweater Song' riff and I was like, 'Yes, this is so cool.'"
The singer then flashes forward, stating, "A couple of years went by, we got signed, put out a record, it blew up, very happy. Then in 1995, we end up playing a big festival in New York City and Lars Ulrich was there from Metallica and I saw him backstage. The truth is, I was a huge metalhead in high school and that's how I learned to play my instrument. And then suddenly it occurred to me, 'The Sweater Song,' the riff, it's actually very similar to 'Sanitarium.'"
f448fe82f3