In keeping with our now-annual ritual of self-congratulation and own-horn-toot-tooting, the Scene's music blog, Nashville Cream, is throwing itself a party and inviting friend, foe and anonymous troll alike to come on feel the noise with us. For this year's installment, we invited My So-Called Band to perform an album from the '90s en toto, and they chose Weezer's 1997 classic Pinkerton.
Why Weezer? As drummer Sam Smith explains, Weezer is the band that brought his band together. When he and bassist Keith Lowen played a show with their old band Lifeboy, they saw a band called Esposito (featuring future bandmates Dave Paulson and Josh Weston) do a cover of Weezer's "Holiday," and a connection was made (to coin a phrase). "We had found kindred spirits in these guys, and they spoke to us in the language of Weezer," Smith says, speaking both the language of Weezer and the language of rock dorks across the land.
"Seriously. Rivers Cuomo really was our Brian Wilson," Paulson says. "A guy who was able to take — bear with me — an emerging, primal sound, and make a symphony out of it. It makes 'Can't Stop Partyin' ' that much more tragic." Let's not visit the tragic kingdom that is the Weezer of today, though. Let us instead ask, Why Pinkerton, and not that other Weezer album that is blue in color?
"Now, for a lot people, Pinkerton was a record that needed to grow on them," Weston says. "It was nasty, raw and a little too sexy for many. But for this l'il boy, it changed my life. I compare it to what it might have felt like to find out that the earth was round, and you wouldn't just fall off the edge if you decided to do a little exploring. I was saved ... born again, and nothing could undo what I was hearing."
Plus, in the perverse universe of indie fandom, it's that much better an album for not being the mega-success it could have been. As Paulson says, "One upside to having a great album flop, especially before the Internet ruined everything — it becomes a legend very quickly. Pinkerton was already sacred — and Weezer were already Salingers — by '98."
But enough about that. Hard-touring troubador Tristen brings her rough-and-tumble melodies to the Exit/In stage, along with the mid-fi bedroom-core pop of Shaky Voices — who composed a slinky Cream theme song earlier this year that most often elicited the response, "I feel dirty now." If that's not enough incentive for you, we'll also be giving away a lot of free stuff, including VIP passes for Next Big Nashville, tickets to a slew of upcoming shows, albums, a Grimey's gift certificate and even a guitar perfect for playing "El Scorcho" in the garage.
