Weezer – Songs From The Black Hole
(soniclovenoize reconstruction)
Act I:
1. Blast Off!
2. You Won’t Get With
Me Tonight
3. Why Bother?
4. Maria’s Theme
5. Come To My Pod
6. This Is Not For Me
7. Tired of Sex
Act II:
8. Superfriend
9. She’s Had A Girl
10. Good News!
11. Getting Up and
Leaving
12. Now I Finally See
13. Getchoo
14. I Just Threw Out
The Love Of My Dreams
Act III:
15. Waiting On You
16. No Other One
17. Devotion
18. What Is This I
Find?
19. Longtime Sunshine
In an intentional effort for this blog to cover contemporary
albums as well as the classic, this is a reconstruction of what could have been
Weezer’s second album, the intended 1995 “space”-rock opera Songs From The
Black Hole. After a few rounds of
demo-stage development and an initial recording session, the album was
eventually scrapped and reworked into the first four songs of their second
album proper, 1996’s Pinkerton. My
reconstruction is designed to be a full, complete album (as much as possible
anyways) so a number of edits and crossfades were made; this is not simply a
playlist of the intended songs from Songs From The Black Hole. Furthermore, in an effort for the album to
become ‘more operatic’, pieces of "Longtime Sunshine" were used throughout to
create a leitmotif and the entire album was organized into three 15-minute
acts. All recordings used were authentic Weezer or Rivers Cuomo recordings; no fan-made covers or re-imaginations were used.
This reconstruction is technically a revision as I had
previously created one in late 2010 upon the release of Alone III (the solo
Rivers Cuomo release containing the final missing pieces needed to reconstruct
Songs From The Black Hole).
Unfortunately that reconstruction suffered from the ethos of ‘trying to
being the first!’ and had some errors I regret making. It was a hasty reconstruction made to compete
with about thirty others, all making ‘their own take on SFTBH’, and mine contained
some missteps (namely my attempt to change the ending of the rock opera
itself!). I believe hindsight has
allowed me to create a more natural, flowing, and complete Songs From The Black Hole
reconstruction, one truer to Rivers Cuomo’s original narrative and presented as a sonically finished album.
A problem with the source material is the varying quality of
recordings. Since only half of this
album was even recorded properly in the studio, half of this reconstruction can
only exist as solo Rivers Cuomo demo tapes.
Luckily for us, Weezer intentionally recorded the songs from Songs From
The Black Hole—and Pinkerton as well—in a rough, harsh and abrasive manner,
reminiscent of live recordings. The
reality is that these rough-sounding studio recordings generally sit well
alongside Cuomo’s own rough-sounding home demos! To further push this envelope I chose to use
alternate 'rough takes' of “Getchoo” and “Tired of Sex” found on the Pinkerton
Delux remaster. That also allows us a
further alternate listening experience to that of Pinkerton (which is the
reason we are doing this in the firstplace, right?).
A second lucky break for us, Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo
and roadie Karl Koch has given the Weezer fan community an abundance of
information about this intended album.
We know there were three official tracklists: two demo versions and an
actual script of the opera, complete with character dialog and musical
interludes, written by Cuomo. The
question is which tracklist should be used?
In looking at the source material available, it seems that the elongated
and often superfluous script-tracklist contains versions of the songs we simply
do not have. For instance, alternate
lyrical versions of “Tragic Girl”; we could not use this track in our
reconstruction because the version we have does not fit the lyrical narrative
and thus makes no sense. Furthermore, it
seems the demo versions available to us from the Alone series are all from Cuomo’s
second tracklist (because of the inclusion of “Who You Callin Bitch?”), yet the
available version of “You Won’t Get With Me Tonight” is from the first
tracklist (as the lyrics overlap with the aforementioned “Who You Callin
Bitch?” instead of acting as a closing number).
The answer is to combine all three versions of the tracklist into one ad
hoc tracklist. Furthermore, each act
features the addition of one song not originally featured on the tracklists in
an effort to round each act up to 15 minutes and thus a 45-minute total album
runtime. These include “Why Bother?”
(long-known to have been a part of the project but just simply not found on the
demo), “Waiting On You” (featured in the third script-tracklist but not the
demos) and “Getting Up And Leaving” (while not a part of either of the three
tracklists, a Pinkerton-era outtake that thematically fits perfectly into SFTBH). Lastly, some volume adjustments were made on
certain songs to make this a more sonically dynamic album all around.
Act I of my reconstruction begins with the piano intro to
“Longtime Sunshine” hard edited into “Blast Off!”. Not only does this create an excellent
leitmotif and introduction to the album but it solves the problem of the
missing first beat of “Blast Off” (lost somewhere on an older demo
presumably). Here we see the main protagonist Jonas
embarking on a space-mission and discussing his woes to shipmates Wuan, Dondo
and the android M1. Upon entering the
scene, Dondo calls the ship’s cook—Jonas’s ex-flame Maria--an unflattering
expletive, which instigates a conversation between Jonas and Maria contained in the lyrics of the
following song. This becomes
problematic in my reconstruction since we have two songs that occupy the same
“narrative space” from two different tracklists: “Who You Callin Bitch” and
“You Won’t Get With Me Tonight”. Since
the later is a mainstay of the album and, in this author’s opinion, is one of
the band’s best songs, we should give the song its prominent place. Here I’ve created a hard edit from the first
half of “Who You Calling Bitch” directly into “You Won’t Get With Me Tonight”
so there is little lyrical overlap. The
channels of the song were switched so that the drums are predominantly panned
to the left to match the previous songs.
This segues directly into “Why Bother?”, which although was not present
on any of the tracklists, it is common knowledge that it was a part of
SFTBH. Here it is placed in the only
logical position, as Jonas explains his hesitancy to be with Maria because of
previous heartbreaks. “Maria’s Theme” is
the combination of “Oh Jonas” and “Please Remember” with a softened fade-in
from its usually clipped beginning, in which Jonas is beckoned by Maria and
finally gives in to his own desires. Segued
into the love scene of “Come To My Pod”, it is followed by Jonas’s sudden
realization that this is not for him in the aptly-titled “This Is Not For Me”, which
I have crossfaded into the beginning of the studio outtake version of “Tired of
Sex” mimicking the demo arrangements.
Act II fades in with the a capella arrangement of “Longtime
Sunshine” (thought to be the “reprise” version found on the demo sequence)
edited into “Superfriend” in which Jonas confides to his friend Laurel his
romantic woes, who subsequently scorns him.
Laurel is the “good girl”, in contrast to the "bad girl" Maria, and Jonas
realizes he is smitten by his shipmate and confidant; unfortunately Laurel has friend-zoned
him, halting his affection. Later, Maria gives birth to Jonas’s
daughter as depicted in the following “She’s Had A Girl” and Jonas realizes he
is trapped. Suddenly Wuan and Dondo
enter the scene and announce that their spaceship has finally landed in “Good
News!”. Next is my own creative decision
to beef up the album by adding “Getting Up And Leaving”, a song not usually
from Songs From The Black Hole. Yet it completely fits in with the themes of escapism in the opera, and when placed
here, Jonas is literally leaving Maria and his
newborn daughter (details otherwise ambiguous). Next is “Now I Finally See” in which Jonas
realizes he wants to be with Laurel and tries to win her over. She denies him yet again (details of this are
ambiguous in the opera) and Jonas laments in the rough tracking alternate take
of “Getchoo” while likewise Laurel second-guesses herself in “I Just Threw Out The
Love Of My Dreams”.
Act III opens with the last non-tracklist addition, the
Pinkerton B-side “Waiting On You”, which was actually written for the
unreleased SFTBH anyways. Here Maria cries
out, waiting, wanting and hoping for Jonas’s return to her and their
child. After Laurel’s rejection, Jonas has
an epiphany that Maria, the “bad girl”, was the right girl for him all along in
“No Other One” and the two lovers finally embrace and rejoice in “Devotion”. In a devastatingly dramatic turn, all expectations come crashing down when Jonas
finds a used condom in “What Is This I Find?” Used by Maria and either
Wuan or Dondo during Jonas’s absence, this fulfills his own prophesy from Act
I—"Why bother? It’s gonna hurt me." At the
conclusion of the rock opera, Jonas reiterates the reoccurring sentiment of escapism
throughout Songs From The Black Hole in “Longtime Sunshine”, a metaphor for 'the
great something' that Jonas is searching for, be it space travels or amorous
ventures.
What is the moral of this story, if any? Jonas is tragic character
poisoned by his own wanderlust. He
leaves us with a final goodbye and a warning that one’s own indecision is one's
own condemnation. One can never truly escape
anything, and it’s often best to buckle down and face it head-on rather than
run away from it. Or, rather, blast off up into the
stars...
Sources used:
Rivers Cuomo – Alone: The Home Demos of Rivers Cuomo (2007)
Rivers Cuomo – Alone II: The Home Demos of Rivers Cuomo (2008)
Rivers Cuomo – Alone III: The Pinkerton Years (2010)
Weezer – Pinkerton (deluxe edition, 2010)
flac --> wav
--> editing in SONAR & Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included
