1. Rivers Cuomo is an American musician best known as the lead vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter of the rock band Weezer.
51 Facts About Rivers Cuomo
1. 2.
Rivers Cuomo played in several bands in Connecticut and California before forming Weezer in 1992.
3.
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.
4.
Rivers Cuomo was raised in Rochester, New York, at the Rochester Zen Center, until his father left the family in 1975.
5.
Rivers Cuomo's mother relocated the family to Yogaville, an ashram in Pomfret, Connecticut.
6.
Rivers Cuomo attended the Pomfret Community School, and his mother married Stephen Kitts.
7.
Rivers Cuomo was a member of the high school choir and performed in a school production of Grease as Johnny Casino.
8.
Rivers Cuomo changed his name to Peter Kitts; after graduating, Cuomo reverted to his original name.
9.
In 1990 and 1991, while Rivers Cuomo was writing material for what became Weezer's debut album, he was a roadie for the band Kingsize.
10.
Rivers Cuomo worked at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, where he met the drummer Patrick Wilson.
11.
Rivers Cuomo began to move away from metal and absorbed alternative influences such as Nirvana, the Pixies and Sonic Youth.
12.
Rivers Cuomo dived deep into The Beach Boys and The Beatles which would influence his songwriting.
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Rivers Cuomo did not want audiences to realize he had once been a metal musician, as "there was so much anxiety about authenticity at the time".
14.
Rivers Cuomo began to think of himself as a singer for the first time.
15.
Rivers Cuomo formed Weezer in 1992 with Wilson, the bassist Matt Sharp and the guitarist Jason Cropper.
16.
In March 1995, Rivers Cuomo had extensive surgery to extend his left leg, which was 44 millimetres shorter than the right.
17.
In late 1995, Rivers Cuomo enrolled at Harvard University to study classical composition.
18.
Rivers Cuomo became introverted and grew a beard, mentioning in a letter to the Weezer fan club that students wearing Weezer T-shirts did not recognize him.
19.
Rivers Cuomo had planned Weezer's second album to be a rock opera, Songs from the Black Hole, but he abandoned the project as his songwriting became "darker, more visceral and exposed, less playful".
20.
Rivers Cuomo enrolled at Harvard twice more and completed semesters in 1997 and 2004.
21.
In February 1998, Rivers Cuomo disbanded Homie and moved to Los Angeles to work on new Weezer demos with Bell and Wilson, but the sessions were unproductive.
22.
On December 6,2009, Rivers Cuomo suffered cracked ribs and internal bleeding when his tour bus hit an icy road in Glen, New York, and crashed.
23.
Rivers Cuomo has contributed to recordings by various other musicians.
24.
Rivers Cuomo managed the band AM Radio in 2002 and 2003; he and the band's frontman, Kevin Ridel, went to school together.
25.
In early 2004, Rivers Cuomo joined ex-Weezer bassist Matt Sharp onstage at California State University, Fullerton.
26.
In March 2008, Rivers Cuomo began a YouTube video series in which he wrote a song in collaboration with YouTube viewers.
27.
In November 2010, Rivers Cuomo released Alone III: The Pinkerton Years.
28.
Rivers Cuomo has made cameos in music videos including the Crystal Method's "Murder" and the Warlocks' "Cocaine Blues".
29.
Rivers Cuomo makes a guest appearance on Sugar Ray's "Boardwalk", the first single on the group's 2009 album Music for Cougars.
30.
In 2011, Rivers Cuomo collaborated with Japanese singer Hitomi for her first independent album Spirit, in the duet "Rollin' with da Homies", which he co-wrote.
31.
Rivers Cuomo was featured on the Simple Plan song "Can't Keep My Hands Off You" and Miranda Cosgrove's song "High Maintenance".
32.
In 2015, Rivers Cuomo appeared on Big Data's song "Snowed In", from its album 2.0.
33.
Rivers Cuomo co-wrote the song "Why Won't You Love Me" on 5 Seconds of Summer's 2018 album Youngblood.
34.
Rivers Cuomo performed a live cover of Toto's "Africa" during the homecoming halftime show at Santa Monica College.
35.
Also in 2018, Rivers Cuomo released a single called "Medicine for Melancholy", produced by AJR.
36.
In 2020, Rivers Cuomo released more than 2,000 demos and home recordings on his website.
37.
In November 2022, Rivers Cuomo released the Indonesian-language song "Anak Sekolah", originally by Indonesian singer Chrisye.
38.
Rivers Cuomo later performed the song live with Weezer during its headline appearance at SoundrenAline 2022 in Jakarta.
39.
Rivers Cuomo sometimes uses the piano to write vocal melodies he would not create through singing, and vocally improvises melodies for guitar solos, to avoid guitar habits and create solos "you can sing along to" with "space in [them] because I have to breathe".
40.
Rivers Cuomo maintains Spotify playlists of music with chord progressions for inspiration.
41.
Rivers Cuomo finds lines that fit the melody and assembles them in a way that suggests a story.
42.
Rivers Cuomo credited the Beach Boys as a major influence on his early songwriting.
43.
On tour with the band after the Blue Album, Rivers Cuomo listened extensively to the operas Aida and Madama Butterfly, the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, and the musical Les Miserables, which influenced the composition of Pinkerton and the unreleased Songs from the Black Hole.
44.
Rivers Cuomo recorded the Blue Album with a Gibson Les Paul Special, a Gibson Les Paul Junior, and a Fender Jaguar borrowed from producer Ric Ocasek.
45.
On June 18,2006, Rivers Cuomo married Kyoko Ito, whom he met in 1997 at one of his solo concerts at the Middle East club in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
46.
Rivers Cuomo was born with equally long legs, but as he grew, his right leg grew nearly two inches longer than his left.
47.
Rivers Cuomo has been vegetarian since childhood, but in 2002, he told an interviewer that he might like to start eating meat regularly and said he had done so in the past, eating "some kind of barbecued beef in Tokyo".
48.
Rivers Cuomo helped acquire music rights and provided financial support for the 2007 documentary The Dhamma Brothers, about Vipassana meditation being instituted in an Alabama state prison.
49.
In early 2008, Rivers Cuomo played in the Mia and Nomar Celebrity Soccer Challenge and scored a goal in the game.
50.
Rivers Cuomo performed at a campaign rally for Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang in Iowa on November 1,2019, though he did not explicitly endorse Yang.
51.
Rivers Cuomo took the CS50 course and maintains a GitHub profile and a Discord server.